Journalists and political commentators took to social media to react to an article from The Atlantic that compared former President Trump to several fascist dictators, including Adolf Hitler.
The Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum argued, “The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics.”
Independent journalist Glenn Greenwald criticized the headline on X, stating, “When you spend 8 years calling a person every bad name you can think of — including Hitler — only to see that it’s not working, so you desperately decide the only thing left for you to do is call him all the bad names at once.”
Tom Bevan, co-founder and president of RealClearPolitics, mocked the headline’s dramatic nature, commenting, “The Atlantic with a threefer.”
Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for The Federalist, reacted by saying, “When Hitler isn’t bad enough!”
The Atlantic’s national editor, Scott Stossel, praised Applebaum’s analysis, noting, “My colleague [Applebaum] knows as much about the history of authoritarian regimes as anyone. When she says that Trump has begun using the language of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with clear intentionality, pay attention.”
In the article, Applebaum called Trump’s rhetoric “ugly and repellent” and emphasized that “these words belong to a particular tradition.” She elaborated by citing historical examples of similar language, such as Adolf Hitler’s statements: “In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped ‘cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People.’” Applebaum also referenced Nazi propaganda that dehumanized Jews by depicting them as vermin, writing, “In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: ‘Jews are lice: they cause typhus.’”
In response to the article, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called it “more fake news by a third-rate media outlet” in a statement to Fox News Digital. He added, “Kamala Harris, Democrats, and their media enablers are the ones who are deranged by emboldening those who threaten the safety of President Trump.” Cheung went on to condemn what he described as “violent rhetoric” and accused Democrats of inciting violence against Trump through their attacks and “loaded and dangerous rhetoric.”
