After a bitterly-contested election last November, there seemed to be a consensus among sensible people that it was time to turn down the volume a notch on the hysterical partisanship that characterized so much of political discourse in 2024. Two attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump and the failure of the Democrats’ efforts to convince a majority of voters that the election was a choice between democracy and authoritarianism, if not Nazism, should have prompted some soul-searching about how Americans had been conducting themselves. It seemed time for everyone to calm down and stop demonizing their political opponents, as well as family, friends and neighbors who happened to vote for a different candidate.

Perhaps that was asking too much of those who had spent the last 10 years convincing themselves that the “bad orange man” wasn’t merely a crass and sometimes vulgar person with whom they disagreed, but the epitome of all evil.

And so, just in time for the annual observance of Yom Hashoah—the day set aside in the Hebrew calendar for remembrance of the Holocaust, which this year starts on the evening of April 23 and continues through Thursday, April 24—we’ve seen a new spurt of shameless and disgraceful efforts to compare Trump, his administration and his supporters to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Those guilty of doing this seem to be laboring under the delusion that they are fearless truth-tellers, rallying the “resistance” against an evil president that many of them believe seeks an end to democracy. The administration is not exempt from criticism, but their promiscuous use of invocations of Hitler and the Nazis indicates more than just a bad case of Trump derangement syndrome.

Holocaust education failed

The way the discussion about the president always seems to circle back to Germany in the 1930s and ’40s is a glaring sign that efforts to educate Americans about the Holocaust have utterly failed. Those comparing Trump to Hitler aren’t just guilty of hyper-partisanship and bad history. They are essentially reducing the worst crime in the history of humanity to just another bitter political dispute that has nothing to do with the Nazis’ totalitarianism and mass murder.

Indeed, it’s entirely possible that most attempts at Holocaust education fail to convey the enormity of what the Nazis and their collaborators did. More people may have heard of the Holocaust in the last few decades because of efforts to spread knowledge about it. But since so many of these programs that have become required to one degree or another in the schools of 39 states emphasize universalizing it, all they seem to have done is to popularize it as a metaphor for anything people think is bad, prejudicial or unkind. Few, including many highly educated opinion leaders as well as Jews, seem to understand that it was a singular world event that was a product of 2,000 years of antisemitism.

Among the most egregious recent examples include a speech by former Vice President Al Gore in which he analogized what he called the administration’s attempt to create their own reality to the Nazis. Gore led into this claim by saying that Holocaust analogies are wrong. But then, as if to remind listeners that he was a career politician before he began assuming the pose of a global wise man, he went ahead and made one. All administrations spin the truth and sometimes flat-out lie for political advantage, not least the one in which he was No. 2 to President Bill Clinton. But talk about honesty is rich coming from a man who won an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize and an equally undeserved Oscar for a documentary film about the environment that was packed with inaccuracies, half-truths and wild prophecies such as one about an impending 20-foot sea-level rise that never happened.

Another was the piece published by The Forward that actually compared a broad range of mainstream conservative opinions—including critiques of former President Joe Biden’s incompetence; the way radical ideologues had taken over American education and fueled antisemitism; the neglect of the interests of working-class voters; and the Democratic Party’s use of banana republic-style lawfare to thwart the will of the voters—to Nazi propaganda.

Specifically, the article said that the dissatisfaction with the left that enabled Trump to win both the popular vote and the Electoral College was nothing more than a recycled version of the dolchstosslegende: the Hitlerian claim that Germany was defeated in World War I and then plunged into economic chaos was because it had been stabbed in the back by the Jews. Bristling with denial about these issues and contempt for the American people, the argument seemed to be that voters who were dissatisfied with the failures and extremism of the Democrats were just buying Nazi-style big lies.

Dinner with Hitler?

Yet as insane and dishonest as those arguments were, perhaps even worse was the op-ed that led The New York Times’ opinion section on April 21 by comedian, actor and “Seinfeld” show writer-producer Larry David. In it, David is clearly attempting to skewer liberal comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, who recently spoke on his HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher” about having dinner with Trump in the White House. Maher shocked many of his fellow Trump-haters by discovering that—while he remained in fierce disagreement with the president’s positions and policies, and deplored many of his statements—he was also a pleasant dinner companion. More importantly, he was also not the fire-breathing demon of the liberal imagination. Indeed, Maher felt bound to tell his viewers that Trump was capable of calm discourse and willing to accept disagreement with a smile or a shrug in much the way any reasonable person would behave.

There was nothing intrinsically remarkable or newsworthy about Maher’s comments. Tales of Trump’s civility, kindness and generosity have always competed with other stories about his bad behavior, rapacity and incivility. It’s likely that both narratives are true, as Trump is a complex character who is neither a saint nor a devil, but a larger-than-life figure capable of great deeds as well as sins. But whatever people may think of him, he is no dictator or mass murderer.

David has made hundreds of millions by monetizing a comedy act rooted in a peculiar mix of oblivious obnoxiousness that amuses many people while repelling others (including myself). But he speaks for many other liberal elites who believe that Maher committed an unpardonable sin by “normalizing” Trump rather than treating him as a great villain deserving of nothing but vilification. In his crudely written piece that has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer blow, which is what passes for wit these days among orthodox liberals, David wrote of a fictional dinner and exchange of views with Hitler, similar to Maher’s evening with Trump.

David made headlines for helping ostracize attorney and longtime Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, a fellow Democrat who nevertheless defended Trump against what he considered to be inappropriate impeachment charges, even screaming at him in public. David would clearly like to do the same to Maher. He seems to be claiming that sharing a meal with Trump—and discovering that when meeting him face to face, it turns out that he isn’t a cartoon bad guy or the worst criminal in history—is no different from the attempts to downplay Hitler’s evil, as many appeasers did in the 1930s.

Normalizing violence rather than Trump

This is a dangerous brand of politics because it seems to be rooted in a view that it’s not enough to oppose the president by normal democratic means. Many who belong to the party that claims it is the defender of democracy aren’t chastened by its defeat last year and the way it was abandoned by working-class voters of all races. Instead, they believe that the appropriate reaction to Trump 2.0 is “resistance.” This further polarizes an already deeply divided country and raises the prospect of normalizing political violence, which, as Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro discovered during Passover in the state’s capital of Harrisburg, is now more likely to come from antisemitic Israel-haters who have swallowed leftist propaganda rather than from right-wing extremists.

It also turns the debate over every issue into one that winds up where Trump’s opponents appear willing to oppose and vilify even his most reasonable positions. That’s true of his determination to take action against antisemitism on U.S. college campuses. It can also lead to them to dishonestly lionize unworthy persons who are falsely put forward as martyrs of his administration’s policies. One example is the absurd comparison of a deported criminal illegal immigrant who was an MS-13 gang member accused of domestic violence to Alfred Dreyfus, the innocent victim of an antisemitic conspiracy in 1894 in France, as The Forward did this week in another unhinged article.

Trump’s opponents did the same in 2020 when the Jewish Democratic Council produced a video comparing the Republicans to the Nazis that was shamefully endorsed by historian Deborah Lipstadt and former Anti-Defamation League leader Abe Foxman, who were competing for the post of Biden’s antisemitism envoy, a State Department position. Lipstadt, who won that competition, recently confessed that, in contrast to Trump’s willingness to take action against Jew-hatred, the Biden administration failed to do so while not explaining why she was silent about that when speaking up would have mattered.

That Trump, who has been the most pro-Israel president since the founding of the modern-day State of Israel, as well as the most active and effective opponent of antisemitism ever to sit in the Oval Office, should be compared to Hitler is not merely egregious but a reflection of something truly sick in contemporary political discourse.

The real scandal here is not the offense given to Trump, who can take abuse as well as dish it out with the best of them. Nor is it the blithe obtuseness to public sentiment outside of the bubble of liberal elite opinion that his opponents demonstrate by resorting to such calumnies. The problem is that we’ve gotten to the point where there is simply no penalty in the public square for engaging in Holocaust analogies that ought to be beneath contempt and out of bounds for even the bitterest political dispute.

Expecting good taste from Larry David may be as ridiculous as anything his semi-autobiographical character on his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” show did. But the fact that a publication that still claims to be the “newspaper of record” for the nation, no matter how outdated that title might be, would publish and highlight a piece comparing the president to Hitler tells us something important. It shows that despite the lip service they give it, the chattering classes and the liberal establishment care nothing about the Holocaust or its lessons. The same is true for Gore, the editors of The Forward and so many other partisans who have succumbed to the same temptation over the last decade as they struggled in vain to contain their loathing for Trump.

Silent about Hitler’s heirs

For them, the memory of the Six Million, including 1.5 million children, and the eliminationist campaign of the Nazis isn’t sacred in of itself. Nor does it seem to be a reminder of their duty to demonstrate solidarity with the efforts to thwart those who seek the genocide of the Jews today by Hamas and other Iranian-backed terrorists who aren’t so much analogous to Hitler and his supporters as they are the 21st-century successors to his ideological campaign to exterminate the Jewish people. Clearly, for Trump-haters, the Shoah is just a political cudgel to be wielded against opponents as they adhere to the absurd solipsistic belief that anyone they don’t like is Hitler.

It also ill behooves those on the left, including Jews, who have been largely publicly indifferent to the war on Israel being waged by the genocidal Islamists of Hamas and other Iranian terror proxies, as well as the surge of antisemitism that was unleashed after the Palestinian attacks and atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to be throwing around Holocaust analogies.

Discussions of the Holocaust should remain separate from partisan battles. Those who wish to speak of it—no matter whether they are Jewish or non-Jewish, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal—should understand that the most important way to honor the legacy of the Holocaust is to stand in solidarity with Israel. The Jewish state is its only true memorial and the guarantee that powerlessness will never again permit the mass murder of millions of Jews. By contrast, nothing degrades the memory of what the Nazis did more than to invoke this tragic history in order to virtue-signal distaste for a political opponent like Trump.

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