The host has an old rule – “The first one to make a Hitler comparison loses the debate.”  I don’t think he has cited the rule since he moved to the morning show, but it has always made sense to me.  Basically, to make comparisons to Hitler cheapens the extreme evil Hitler is actually responsible for.  No one in American politics – NO ONE – is proposing or contemplating mass genocide.  Here endeth the comparison.  Therefore, the comparison is just name-calling, and sadly trite, unoriginal name-calling at that.

And so it has come to be that “Trump is Hitler” is the latest election meme.  It started, best as I can tell, with this Jeffery Goldberg piece in The Atlantic.  But it has bounced around the inside of the Democrat/media echo chamber, with increasing volume, ever since.  It has made it all the way to out of the mouths of Obama and Harris.  The Federalist has made it a major project to refute the claim with pieces like this and this – even if, as we have said, the meme refutes itself.

Most Republicans are viewing this as just another sign that we are on the road to a major victory.  Things are getting a bit ebullient here on the Republican side of the aisle.  And I agree, Republican victory is looking more and more likely.  But I am a bit fearful of that victory – not because of what a Republican led government will do, but because of what those that dislike, no, despise, noooo, hate, passionately, Donald Trump will do.  Those that are buying into the “Trump is Hitler” meme, and there are a lot of them, if not a majority, frighten me.

In the last week we have discussed that Mark Halperin thinks a Trump victory will begin the “worst mental health crisis in the nation’s history.”  I am very concerned that the election will sit in abeyance for months on end as the courts eventually have to pick the winner.  And now, given how the media has picked up on the “Trump is Hitler” meme, I fear they may never acknowledge a Trump victory should it occur – claiming him illegitimate as a human being let alone a president.  January 6 was an idiotic and criminal action by a relatively few crazed Trump supporters, but we may be on the verge of something that while not violent is far more revolutionary — a large minority of the American public – supported by the media – that simply refuses to accept the outcome of a national election.

In the end, Trump quelled the passions that drove Jan 6 by engaging in the peaceful transfer of power, as is the great American tradition.  But the current President (I think he is still around, somewhere?) is in no position to quell anything, barely capable of leaving office under his own power.  Trump’s opposition is engaging in this nonsense, willfully amplified by the media.  Rather than consolidating power in the wake of an overwhelming electoral victory I fear the new regime will, from Day One, be a salmon swimming upstream after a record rainfall – battling for every inch against unprecedented forces.

The “Trump is Hitler” meme is indeed an act of desperation – but it is also an act that raises great questions.  What won’t they do to oppose Trump?  And in the event of a Trump victory, what won’t they do in defiance of the will of the American people?

There has been much discussion of the “irrationality” of religious faith in recent decades.  But it looks increasingly like it may be the irrationality of unreasoning hatred that is the genuine problem.