It’s straight from Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin’s Law — you know, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” He wants us all to know that that is not a proscription, just a description. When he coined it, it was intended as a joke, but it’s not funny anymore.
But when people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.
And that’s why Godwin’s Law isn’t violated — or confirmed — by the Biden reelection campaign’s criticism of Trump’s increasingly unsubtle messaging. We had the luxury of deriving humor from Hitler and Nazi comparisons when doing so was almost always hyperbole. It’s not a luxury we can afford anymore.
It used to be that you could use Godwin’s Law to accuse someone of hyperbole, but not in the case of Trump. He really is a bombastic racist who wants to take over the government and round up his critics in camps. He has said so!
The steady increase in Hitler comparisons during the Trump era is not a sign that my law has been repealed. Quite the opposite. Godwin’s Law is more like a law of thermodynamics than an act of Congress — so, not really repealable. And Trump’s express, self-conscious commitment to a franker form of hate-driven rhetoric probably counts as a special instance of the law: The longer a constitutional republic endures — with strong legal and constitutional limits on governmental power — the probability of a Hitler-like political actor pushing to diminish or erase those limits approaches 100 percent.
Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.
Godwin is so confident that “more and more of us can see” how awful Trump is, but there is a troubling exception. The major media haven’t figured it out. Or they have, and are doing the bidding of their wealthy masters. Rather than calling out the wanna-be dictator, they’re instead doing their best to raise doubts about his opponent, Biden. I’m not a great fan of Biden, but he is a competent bureaucrat, and a far, far better person than Trump. This election ought to be sliding towards a total blowout, but I still see ridiculous headlines and op-eds that are desperately trying to inflate the contest into a nail-biter, and they might succeed.
Every article that whines that Biden is “too old” needs to recognize that yes, he is old and we’d prefer someone younger, but he’s a fit and active man, in contrast to the guy who is only four years younger, has to paint his face orange to look less corpse-like, and who thinks driving around a golf course on a cart is exercise. And is so bad at golf that he has to cheat.
Every article that blames Biden for the economy needs to be taught about relative comparisons. The economy is better than it was under the Republicans, as it always is. If the state of the economy isn’t good enough for you now, why do you still give the time of day to an incompetent crook who is guaranteed to make it worse?
Oh no, his poll numbers are down. Who cares, a year before the election? Poll numbers are going to be jittering up and down like the chart lines on a Trump lie detector test. They’re a game the media plays to drive up interest in their lazy reporting, and no one should care. This should not be a popularity contest, it should be a competence contest. But that isn’t entertaining enough.
Here’s what I want: the presidency should be an office filled by a civil servant, not a drama queen. It’s work. It’s a job. It’s well-rewarded, but the office holder should be recognized for how efficiently and smoothly they keep the country running, and that person should be eminently replaceable — they represent a set of policies that can be promoted by anyone with a history of training in government. Right now, the media are treating it as if it were a reality TV show, and are auditioning for someone sufficiently clownish, who can stir up conflict from week to week and keep the ratings high, and nothing could be more stimulating to the viewers than a needy, narcisstic, Hitler wanna-be. Stupid stereotypes and annoying characters are what made “Big Bang Theory” a commercial success, so let’s repeat that formula in our government.
Biden is far from perfect and, like anyone, has flaws, but at least he’s a sane grown-up, and that’s all I want for my president. You know the Republicans aren’t going to promote one of those, ever again.
The builder of shitty hotels does not even promote neoclassic architecture.
He is literally less classy than Benito and Adolph.
Also, Benito played soccer and Adolph was a vegetarian. Not something I associate with serial sexual harasser DT.
“Keep the ratings high”, you know, like a Bond villain. Or JR Ewing.
BTW both Churchill and FDR were older than the art-school reject. Yet they won absolutely over the absolute loser.
Well, it was the media that put Trump in in the first place. Every other candidate ended up paying for advertisements, Trump came up with a shiny, a new howler, overcame all advertisements via screen time in news stories.
That’s still going on. What do we get, a single story about the GOP debates, Trump doesn’t even bother attending, emits another howler, gets a dozen or two new stores – on top of stories about his legal woes.
And one ex-wife and one former maid stated firmly to the press that Trump read a book containing Hitler’s speeches. So, yes, the intent is present.
As for a Trump lie detector test, it’d always read flat. For one’s physiology to alter when lying, one would have to actually care and Trump never cared about the truth, only about what he could get.
Oh, I dunno, the golf cart was fair. Especially given every other world leader walked during the D-day ceremonies and Trump had to ride. But, showing his physical fitness even better was when a general had to help him walk up a ramp. Trump’s excuse, it was steep. Odd that the obviously not very young general had zero difficulty walking up it while towing Trump’s hulk up the ramp.
Come on, it’s unfair to compare Trump to Hitler. He’s more like Charlie Chaplin’s parody of Hitler in “The Little Dictator.”
wzrd1 @4:
They did the same for Dubya (with an assist from the Supreme Court).
I thought Godwin applied when someone says Hitler liked dogs too, not when the target of the comparison is a bona fide authoritarian like Trump. There’s a large minority of people with authoritarian proclivities which might stem from evolved traits. We are stuck with them and they vote.
Is Young Sheldon verboten too? Asking for a friend.
@5 christoph —
Hitler himself was like Chaplin’s parody — that’s what made it good parody. But Hitler himself was decidedly not funny, and (what is Godwin’s point) neither should we see Trump that way, in 2023-2024. “We don’t have that luxury anymore.”
@4 Trump read a book? Trump can read???!
All the misbegotten spawn of that abomination, “Big Bang Theory”, are anathema.
AKA his signature.
Too many of my liberal friends wring their hands over Biden’s age. We need to stop that and start cheerleading, like the Republicans do. Full employment and 3% inflation, heading to 2.5%.
Biden’s enabling and active military support for a genocide in Gaza seems to have disappeared down the memory hole already. Shameful.
I don’t know, being a cheerleader and saying what essentially amounts to, “Biden may not be perfect, he genocides a couple million Palestinians in a scorched earth campaign, but he makes the trains run on time.” sounds pretty disgusting. On issues I care about, Trump has gone from “indistinguishable from Biden” to “is very slightly preferable to Biden”. This is all bad news for team D. Recent polling bears this out.
You should have picked a better candidate, because yours seems to have signed his own death sentence.
@ beholder, #13
So, because you’re mad that Biden is enabling genocide against Palestinians, you prefer Trump, who not only enabled genocide against Palestinians during his term, but also promises genocide against:
Immigrants
Asylum Seekers
Transgender people
Anyone left of McCarthy
Those with mental illness
Ukrainians
Palestinians
I’m sure I left several groups out. Let’s not forget about Project 2025, either, which is set up to saturate the government with White Christian Nationalists who intend to carry Trump’s campaign of hatred against trans people on to all LGBTQ+ people, and strip non-white persons of all basic civil rights.
But sure, Trump is better than Biden… somehow.
vucodlak @ 14, well, another Trump presidency vs global thermonuclear war.
Bring on the nukes, it’ll be quicker and far more merciful than the god-emperor Trump. Hopefully, salted for cobalt-60, just to ensure a properly efficient job is done.
From personal observation of people who have used various permutations of the ‘N’ word against me they are usually much closer to Adolph than I am.
Sorry, which “N” word used by which “Adolph”? Sax? Menjou?
Menjou’s character in Paths of Glory resembles T—p in some ways, though far more attractive and dynamic.
Beholder @13 LOL Trump is going to jail. Biden will get a 2nd term. And because of abortion and Texas, the down ballot ain’t looking so hot for the R’s either.
JimB, don’t forget the woman in Ohio that was arrested for miscarrying into her toilet.
GOP is doing so well, I’m sure they’re all buying pitchfork proof vests.
Yeah, the whole Gaza thing.. Not supporting Israel is a death sentence, no matter what they are doing, because too many people, even among the ones appalled by the genocide, think we “need them as an ally”. There is no practical means to either a) stop them, or b) appose what they are doing, short of what is being done, which is try to minimize the damage, if possible, while whining ineffectually, “Please stop!” Anything else would be political suicide and/or screw up decades of political alliances that even the US politicians that despise what is happening are not willing to risk losing.
I hate this, I think its wrong, I wish we really where both powerful enough, and had solutions that didn’t involve just going in and bombing the leadership of anyone we don’t like out of existence, to solve these kinds of problems, but that is our “only” real solution to these things – to stop Israel from ending Gaza we would have to end Israel, because we literally have no other way to stop it. So, what the F was Biden supposed to do, given the nature of how we have always dealt with Israel and half the damn country thinks we still need to? I certainly don’t see what we could actually do about it, including being “more forceful about apposing it”. I mean, what the F does that even mean in this context, when its literally not feasible politically to just flat out cut ties with them (which I wish it was), a “more strongly worded letter”?
What a perfect timing. In Finland we have a presidential election next month, and just this week one of the candidates (a fascist, who thankfully isn’t one of the top contenders) sued a leftist comedian/Twitter pundit for calling him a fascist.
@20 Kagehi
We all know what he was supposed to do, and we all know why he chose to do what he did. Biden wants this genocide to happen. It aligns with his values.
Biden deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison after being convicted at the Hague, but any semblance of justice we’re likely to see is his defeat in 2024.
beholder @ 22, OK, so Biden loses as justice, we then get the Emperor for life and “a dictatorship for a day”, complete with the Armed Forces ordered to arrest people and hence, a Armed Forces wide mutiny, sparking the second civil war.
Good idea. Just which day should the nuclear exchange on US soil begin?
BTW, just what crimes would Biden be charged with at the Hague? Invading somewhere? Bombing someone? Stealing the silverware from a UN dinner party?
If you’re going to say selling weapons, first show me sanctions against Israel, otherwise you’re charging someone with that which is not a crime under international law.
Sounds to me like, whoever you’d support would be as big a dictator as Trump wants to be.
Biden was supposed to tell Netanyahu and his croniues to stop, or he would withdraw American diplomats from Israel, throw Israeli diplomats out of the US, sponsor a UNSC resolution condemning Israeli warcrimes, and do everythnig he could to cut off supplies of weapons and money. Not doing so makes him complicit in those war crimes.
And with all that, he’s still preferable to Trump. It’s not clear why beholder@22 wants the entire world (starting of course with poor, female and ethnic minority Americans) to be punished for Biden’s complicity in war crimes. Now you could argue that if Biden did right over Israel/Palestine, it would make him more likely to lose to Trump, but that’s by no means clear: American public opinion, particularly among Democrats, has shifted considerably, and Biden could give it a huge shove in the right direction. His main danger in next year’s election is that potential Democratic voters will stay home. A principled and trenchant opposition to fascism whether at home, from Putin, or from Netanyahu, might be his best chance of winning.
@24 KG
Biden was picked by the party, not the people, but first by the party, to represent the party. And, as I said before, possibly some place else, we have a problem where the parties get bloated with everyone running away from what they think is the “crazier people” in the other party. There have been people jumping ship from the Republicans to the Democrats through every Republican administration since Bush. This turns Democrats into a bloated mess of refugees, whose principles and ideals are badly blurred, and the Republicans into one that has increasingly become hyper focused on religion, money, and authoritarianism. This has created a sense of entitlement and almost “divine right” thinking in the Republicans, to the extent that they no longer listen, at all, to people, and spend all their time like preachers, telling people what they should want. They have also, like the same, taken immediate credit for anything that someone else does, which they suddenly discover that the people actually wanted all along, but they ignored, or openly apposed.
But, among the Democrats, this bloat as led to confusion, paralysis, and uncertainty. They still use the same method they always have to assess what people “want” – “Lets create a poll, in which we lay out 5-6 things we think they public might want, then ask them which one they want most.” That they public wants all of them, or worse, a whole mess of things not even on the list, doesn’t matter, because actually “listening” isn’t how they work out what people want. They know they are paralyzed, and that whole sections of their own party won’t go for “everything” on the list, or even everything the public might be demanding, if they did listen, so they focus on single issues. Its a “one things at a time” way of thinking, which fails because some problems actually require a plan that addresses multiple connected problems at the same time, and they are working on step 5, because its obvious and has immediate results, while ignoring steps 1-4, which are harder. It becomes like some bad charities, “We haven’t fixed the problem, either for everyone, never mind forever, but we helped 1.0923% more people this year than last year with your donations! Isn’t that great progress!” Uh.. no, not if 30% of the people that needed it still didn’t flipping “get it”, and all the charity gave them was a bandaid for a single problem, when they have 10 other, just as serious, unaddressed problems.
But, this is also, kind of, the politics of the party that “picked” Biden. So.. given how, and why, and what they expected him to be able to do, and possibly just as importantly, “not do”, I would have been ecstatic if he had acted more swiftly, decisively, and compassionately than he has, instead of playing freaking politics with the situation. But, did I “expect him to”? Not, unfortunately, really.
Kagehi@25,
Joe Biden’s reluctance to call for ceasefire may leave him at odds with his party.
KG, by your standard candle, most national leaders would be charged with war crimes, as Israeli embassies remain open in nearly every nation on the planet.
Meanwhile, the US and Russia both abstained from the last UN vote regarding the conflict, even if it was largely over aid. That’s a start, given previous vetoes on condemnation and sanctions.
Of course, beholder’s candle is even more harsh and basically, like actually exercising MAD. I’m really not big on such extremes, as precisely zero gets accomplished in the end, well, other than global destruction. Makes me suspect someone’s a closet accelerationist.
@22. beholder : “Biden deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison after being convicted at the Hague, but any semblance of justice we’re likely to see is his defeat in 2024.”
Given the badly flawed and outdated US Political system which needs major reforms (including preferential voting and the abolition of the Electoral College, gerrymandering, voter suppression laws, etc..) where it is a two party state and the choices are either the nominee of the Democratic party or the nominee of the Republican party and where it seems practically inevitable that the Democratic party nominee will be Biden* and the Republican one will be Trump**; does this mean you will be voting for, supporting and want Trump to become POTUS again? Do you think Trump will actually be better here or other than catastrophic for the USA and rest of the World?
.* Unless Biden somehow loses the nomination which seems extremely unlikely or is persuaded to resign or forced out by e.g. ill health and be replaced as nominee (most likely by Kamala Harris) which is slightly less unlikely but still highly improbable in my view.
.** Admittedly there’s now more doubt over Trump’s nominee status given the Colorado Court ruling and his legal issues. However, it still seems disturbingly likely that Trump will become the Republican nominee and, even if he isn’t, Trump will have a big say over who that nominee is and they will have extreme racist, regressive Republican policies which among other things are more strongly supportive of the Israeli govt and its actions however genocidal they are.
PS. Also seconding what vucodlak wrote upthread.
Why does the US have basically only two political parties (as in, actually having enough voters and followers to actually achieve being elected)?
The wealthy only want to grudgingly pay for only two bills and that’s under duress, they’d rather only pay for one.
So, the US has the absolute best government that money can buy.
I wouldn’t have any particular problem with that, but most such leaders have not been supplying Israel with the weapons it’s using to pulverise Gaza and slaughter its people, nor blocking calls for a ceasefire at the UN.