The spurt of comments and articles comparing the president and his administration to the Nazis illustrates toxic partisanship and the failure of Holocaust education.
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.