Trump-Hitler comparisons risk boomeranging on Democrats
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” former Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore conceded Monday as he rallied a crowd during San Francisco’s Climate Week.
“It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it,” he added.
Then came the “but.”
“But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil,” Gore said as he quoted Nazis who wrote that the first step in coming to power in Germany was “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.”
“The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” Gore said, delivering his kicker.
Gore’s use of a Nazi comparison as an attack line has become an increasingly familiar presence in politics.
Both parties have used Nazi-name calling against their opponents, though it recently has popped up more often with Democrats, who have ripped the Trump administration and what they see as the rise of an authoritarian government in the United States.
Republicans think Democrats are making a political mistake with the comparisons that will turn off the middle of the electorate and boomerang on them.
“The Democrats and media have overused these phrases to the point where they don’t mean anything anymore,” one national Republican political operative said. “You would think after two failed assassination attempts that they would have stopped using these ridiculous and loaded terms about [President] Trump and his supporters, but instead, they’ve doubled down.”
Gore is far from the only person on the left making the comparison. “Seinfeld” creator Larry David this week imagined going to a dinner with Hitler in a New York Times op-ed headlined “My Dinner with Adolf.”
David’s target was not just Trump but........
© The Hill
