Why Is This Election Even Close?

The morning before Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on October 27, Brendan Buck, a former communications aide to Speakers of the House John Boehner and Paul Ryan, appeared on MSNBC. Buck said that comparing Trump’s event with the infamous pro-Nazi gathering at the Garden in 1939 was “silly” and “completely obnoxious.”

“It is an arena,” a visibly angry Buck insisted. “I don’t think setting foot in Madison Square Garden makes anybody who goes there a Nazi.”

Professing to be a Trump critic, Buck said that comparing Trump to Hitler—and his views to Naziism—alienated undecided voters who might vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

“That’s the kind of rhetoric that just tells people like ‘it doesn’t matter.’ They’re going to say anything they want.’” Buck continued. “I can’t tell you how much that upsets those people who are on the fence on Donald Trump, and they say, ‘They’re just out to get him. They’re going to say anything.’”

Now that Buck has seen the rally, I wonder if he is still offended at the Trump/Hitler comparison.

Trump’s Rally v. Hitler’s Reich

If Trump regains the presidency, he has told everyone what he’ll do with it. Take him at his word.

Lies at the Heart of Trump’s Sales Pitch

TRUMP: Rode to the White House on the wings of his “birther” lie about President Barack Obama. His lies at the Madison Square Garden rally flowed so quickly that fact checkers couldn’t keep up. And his media echo chambers are repeating those lies over and over again until they stick.

As Jonathan Swift observed, “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it.”

HITLER: “[A]t a given sign it unleashes a veritable barrage of lies and slanders against whatever adversary seems most dangerous, until the nerves of the attacked persons break down… This is a tactic based on precise calculation of all human weaknesses, and its result will lead to success with almost mathematical certainty…” (Shirer quoting Hitler, p. 22-23)

Immigrants Are Trump’s Centerpiece Lie

TRUMP: Trump and his vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, portray immigrants as subhuman. In their fantasy world, immigrants are responsible for everything that ails American voters: inflation, high prices, exorbitant rents, housing shortages, crime, everything. They lie to feed that narrative.

Vance’s admitted that he made up his claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing household pets and eating them. But Trump still repeated and amplified the lie, turning the community inside out.

Trump claims that he’ll “liberate” Aurora, Colorado, from non-existent immigrant gangs he claimed run the city.

He calls America a “garbage can” of the world’s worst people—another lie..

He refers to immigrants as “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He says, falsely, that millions of them are criminals from “prisons,” “mental institutions,” and “insane asylums.”

HITLER: Wrote in Mein Kampf that he “was repelled by the conglomeration of races…repelled by this whole mixture of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Croats, and everywhere the eternal mushroom of humanity – Jews and more Jews… [His] hatred grew for the foreign mixture of peoples….” (W. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, p. 27) And, similar to Vance’s views on the need to increase birth rates, he spoke repeatedly about the need to “increase and preserve the species and the race.” (Shirer, p. 86)

“The Enemy From Within” Comprises Trump’s Retribution Agenda

TRUMP: “We’re running against something far bigger than Joe or Kamala, and far more powerful than them, which is a massive, vicious, crooked, radical left machine that runs today’s Democrat party,” Trump told the Madison Square Garden crowd, singling out Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “They’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”

In fact, their only crime was to disagree with and criticize Trump publicly.

Pledging that he will be “dictator for a day,” Trump has said that he will use the military against his foes and tell the Justice Department to target his adversaries. He has vowed publicly to “root out” his political opponents and imprison them.

And he promises to stack the federal government with loyalists who will never disagree with him.

HITLER: “I will know neither rest nor peace until the November criminals [who, he falsely claimed, had ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ with the onerous Versailles Treaty of 1918] had been overthrown.” (Schirer quoting Hitler, p. 70) He banished or executed those who crossed him and surrounded himself with sycophants.

TRUMP: During his first term, Trump stacked the courts, including a federal judge in Florida who dismissed a criminal case against him. Like many of his appointees, she is manifestly unqualified for her position. But now she is reportedly on a list of candidates to be Trump’s next attorney general.

HITLER: Co-opted the judiciary and then established his own special courts. Shredding Germany’s constitution, he alone became the law. (Shirer, 268-274)

Phony Populism

TRUMP: Promising to pursue corporate-friendly policies in return for financial support of his campaign, Trump has pre-sold the presidency. Examples abound: He promised to reverse climate initiatives affecting the major oil companies in return for $1 billion in contributions to his campaign; he now supports cryptocurrency (which he called a “scam” until recently); he adopted a new position favoring the legalization of marijuana; and he vowed to put Elon Musk, who is pouring tens of millions of dollars into Trump’s campaign, in charge of slashing government regulation—which would create stunning conflicts of interest between Musk’s sprawling commercial interests and his government contracts.

Trump got surprising help from media owners Jeff Bezos, who killed a Washington Post editorial endorsing Harris, and Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who refused to let his paper endorse a candidate, which also would have been Harris. At a time requiring courage, they buckled.

HITLER: Cultivated industry leaders who thought they could control the dictator as they supported his rise to power—until it was too late to stop him. They reaped short-term profits, but Germany and the world suffered devastating long-run consequences. (Shirer, p. 143)

Fear, Anger and Terror Are His Favorite Tactics

TRUMP: After losing the election, he encouraged the January 6, 2021 insurrection to remain in power.

HITLER: “I achieved an equal understanding of the importance of physical terror toward the individual and the masses… For while in the ranks of their supporters the victory achieved seems a triumph of the justice of their own cause, the defeated adversary in most cases despairs of the success of any further resistance.” (Shirer, p. 23)

Trump’s Role Models

TRUMP: Trump praises authoritarian leaders of other countries, including Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Kim Jong Un, and Xi Jinping. His longest-serving chief of staff and retired four-star general John Kelly reported Trump’s statement to him that “Hitler did some good things” and that Trump wanted generals who gave the kind of deference that Hitler’s generals gave him.

According to Kelly, Trump meets the definition of a fascist: “Well, looking at the definition of fascism: It’s a far-right authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy. So certainly, in my experience, those are the kinds of things that he thinks would work better in terms of running America.”

Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, said that Trump is “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to the country.” More than 100 other former top Trump advisers agree. Every day, the list grows.

HITLER: His professor described him as lacking “self-control and, to say the least, he was considered argumentative, autocratic, self-opinionated, and bad-tempered, and unable to submit to school discipline.” (Shirer, p. 13)

Here’s the Scariest Part

Whether Trump wins or loses in November, more than 70 million Americans will cast their ballots for him. Most of them know who Trump is. They hear his vile words and heinous promises to destroy democracy and the rule of law in America.

And they are the reason the election will be close. As Brendan Buck asserted, maybe they become upset at Trump/Hitler comparisons.

Or maybe it’s because they can’t handle the truth.