Comparing Trump to Hitler
The coiner of Godwin's law gives his blessing.
Famed Internet attorney Mike Godwin takes to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post to declare, “Yes, it’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you.“
The windup:
My very minor status as an authority on Adolf Hitler comparisons stems from having coined “Godwin’s Law” about three decades ago. I originally framed this “law” as a pseudoscientific postulate: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” (That is, its likelihood approaches 100 percent.)
I first offered this axiom in 1990 as an observation about the discussions that had expanded like algal blooms in the nascent ecologies of online newsgroups. But within a handful of years, the law had taken on a life of its own, leaping beyond the internet and reaching into our broader popular culture.
I felt vindicated because I had designed Godwin’s Law to be viral — to self-propagate among internet users. I had a theory that an individual could have a positive effect on culture by making a catchy joke about people’s worst tendencies toward rhetorical excess. The next step was to release the joke into the wild, then hope others found it clever or funny enough to be worth repeating.
Years after I’d let Godwin’s Law run free, I learned that an actual political philosopher, Leo Strauss, had made a somewhat similar remark a few years before I was born about debates trending toward Hitler. Strauss (whom I confess I still haven’t read) chose to classify Hitler comparisons as a special instance of a particular logical fallacy: reductio ad Hitlerum. He was right about that, but he also missed how funny such an inappropriate comparison might be. The sitcom writers of “Seinfeld” didn’t miss the goofiness — consider their “Soup Nazi.” Similarly, I loved Mel Brooks’s subversion of Hitler in “The Producers” when I discovered it as a kid in the 1960s.
The pitch:
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.
Trump has the backing of political actors who are laboring to give the would-be 47th president the kind of command-and-control government he wants. Their proposals for maximizing and consolidating the powers of the federal government under a single individual at the top — provided that the individual is appropriately “conservative” — don’t sound like an American democracy. Sorry, sticklers, they don’t even sound like an American republic, either. What they sound and look like is a framework to enable fascism. And we have to thank Trump for being admirably forthcoming that he plans to be a dictator — although, he says, only on “Day One.”
What’s arguably worse than Trump’s frank authoritarianism is his embrace of dehumanizing tropes that seem to echo Hitler’s rhetoric deliberately. For many weeks now, Trump has been road-testing his use of the word “vermin” to describe those who oppose him and to characterize undocumented immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Even for an amateur historian like me, the parallels to Hitler’s rhetoric seem inescapable.
We’ve hashed out those statements before and all of the active front-pagers agree: Trump’s statements have morphed from proto-fascist to full-on fascism. While I have somewhat more confidence in the ability of our institutions to constrain the powers of a re-elected Trump than does Godwin, I nonetheless find him dangerous.
Godwin concludes:
Unsurprisingly, though, there are plenty of people who push back whenever anyone or anything gets compared to Hitler or the Nazis — or to related subjects like the Holocaust or the confinement of Jews to ghettos or the systematic killing of civilian populations. Masha Gessen relearned that lesson recently after writing an article for the New Yorker that raised — in an exemplary, thoughtful, nuanced way — the question of whether modern Germany’s promotion of a particular way of thinking about the Holocaust might forbid public questioning of the morality of Israel’s choices in retaliating for Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Gessen was set to receive the Hannah Arendt prize for political thought, but the New Yorker article troubled two sponsors of the event enough to pull out of the award ceremony that had been set to take place in Bremen, Germany. Although Gessen ultimately received the award, the controversy raises two peculiar Godwin’s Law-related issues.
First, has the sheer absurdity of so many hyperbolic Nazi comparisons in popular culture made us less vigilant about the possible reemergence of actual fascism in the world? I think it shouldn’t — comparisons to Hitler or to Nazis need to take place when people are beginning to act like Hitler or like Nazis.
Second, is Germany’s specific culture of remembrance — which privileges the idea that the Holocaust is unique — working, as some have said Godwin’s Law has also functioned, to quash appropriate comparisons of today’s horrors to the 1930s and 1940s? I continue to insist that Godwin’s Law should never be read as a conversation-ender or as a prohibition on Hitler comparisons. Instead, I still hope it serves to steer conversations into more thoughtful, historically informed places.
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.
So, like Godwin, I think comparisons with Hitler or other awful historical figures can be useful. That democracies are fragile if not vigilantly safeguarded is an important lesson.
Most of the time, though, they’re not. For one thing, the reductio ad Hitlerum has been used so often in recent years that it’s been rendered ineffective. (More on that in a follow-on post.) For another, as. Godwin highlights, because of the Holocaust (not to mention starting a world war that killed some 50 million people!), Hitler is an awfully high bar.
Trump is corrupt politician who incited a riot and otherwise attempted to steal a democratic election. That’s bad! But he hasn’t invaded other countries or rounded up his political enemies, much less built concentration camps.
To be sure, Hitler didn’t become Hitler all at once. His transformation from a democratic candidate supported with a little thuggery to a full-on dictator took time. The slow roll into World War II began five years into his tenure. And he didn’t start rounding up Jews and others he deemed undesirable for another four years.
Still, while there were certainly authoritarian tendencies during Trump’s first term, those four years look really, really good compared to Hitler’s! And, even with the outrageous use of words like “vermin” and “poisoning the blood“—which very much echo Hitler and other fascist leaders—I don’t think anyone seriously thinks Trump intends to round up his enemies by the millions and murder them.
But here’s the thing: “Not as Bad as Hitler” isn’t and shouldn’t be the bar by which our presidential candidates are judged!
I’m not sure that pointing out that Trump’s shocking language has parallels with Hitler and Mussolini will persuade anyone who is persuadable to vote for Joe Biden. Biden seems to think so and has repeatedly called it out. Regardless, the mere fact that one of two men who have a realistic chance of winning the next election for President of the United States is calling tens (hundreds?) of millions of Americans “vermin” based on their political beliefs is itself a sufficient outrage to disqualify him from office, Hitler or no Hitler.
Similarly, the very institutions of American government that make it so damned frustrating make it nearly impossible for Trump to consolidate power in the way Hitler did in Germany. But the mere fact that Trump has so little respect for the rule of law, including the orderly transfer of power after free and fair elections, should be enough to disqualify him from being the nation’s chief executive, Hitler be damned. That his co-partisans in Congress have proven almost universally feckless in standing up against his transgressions makes voting for the opposition even more urgent.
Ultimately, while Godwin is right that comparison with Hitler is more appropriate with Trump than for any similarly prominent person in recent American history, I just don’t think it’s useful. At the end of the day, Trump isn’t Hitler and saying he is will simply cause anyone who is still contemplating voting for him next November off. Trump is bad enough on his own terms and should be attacked on that basis.
You can argue that Hitler wasn’t Hitler until he linked up with Goebbels and let him take over the propaganda and communications side of things. I think I read somewhere that it was Goebbels who got him to stop wearing regular suits and put him back into some kind of uniform as it made Hitler look better.
So the question is: has Trump found his Goebbels yet?
Trump, himself, may not plan on rounding people up, but I get a distinct impression that many of his followers want just that. And not just brown people, either, they want everyone who disagrees with him rounded up, too.
RyGuy never came back and explained to us the other day why he thought you, James Joyner, would deserve what he fully expects you to get, or who was gonna make it happen, but it was fairly obvious he was onboard with the idea.
You should remember he has said he wishes to do all those things.
While the “reductio ad Hitlerum” might be a logical fallacy, so is the “no true Hitler” one at the other end of the scale.
Strictly speaking, only Hitler was Hitler.
But such an excessive insistence on the purity of your analogy is not exactly helpful either.
For if you apply that principle consistently, you can never learn from the past. After all, history never repeats itself perfectly.
That would be throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
Unless, of course, you believe that understanding the past can’t help us understand the present – which is silly, IMO.
A corollary to Murphy’s Law can be stated as, “Nature sides with the hidden flaw.” The “hidden flaws” in our Constitution have been evident for some time (the absurdity of the Electoral College; gerrymandering; primary systems that privilege the loudest, most strident voices). Yet our system of government lacks mechanisms to push those with differing views into open and frank discussions of what and how our form of government needs to change.
I have been watching shows like “Under the Banner of Heaven” and the Scorcese movie “Silence” which make an important point: for a lot of people who take religion too seriously, what’s Godly supercedes all else, including, obviously, democracy. Contemporaneously here, check out something called the “Seven Mountains Mandate,” which way too many Americans take all too seriously. Or, alternatively, the slightly different “Christian Reconstructionists.”
It is, IMO, a serious issue that we have a really large subset of the population who would totally welcome a Hitler-like figure able to impose their notion of God’s Will. A lot of them seem to see that potential in Herr Drumpf, the guy who studies “My New Order,” the collection of Hitler’s speeches, great go-bys for rabble rousing tactics.
(I don’t want to bigfoot the other OTB poster who posted the link to the relevant Vanity Fair piece – which I could follow as a VF subscriber).
ETA: Relevent excerpt:
As I noted on yesterday’s thread, I’ve been comparing him to Capone. Capone caused chaos, violence, lawlessness and basically ruled over Chicago for years because the existing system couldn’t deal with his type of threat. He was blatant about his crimes and publicly talked about how his crimining was fine and he was getting away with it. His presence was a destabilizing force to the law since they couldn’t nail him on anything the “proper” way and he knew it. It took a creative approach to get him on charges people thought were pointless, stupid or unfair (income tax was pretty new back then) instead of the terrible things they wanted him in jail for.
People downplay Hitler comparisons because he’s seen as the Greatest Evil!!!! so everyone else is Not So Bad. But Capone? The mobster that got away with his crimes but got nabbed for not doing his taxes? Yeah, people see that one right away. They understand and accept it without fuss – that Trump’s a Bad Guy without quibbling if he’s truly EVIL!!!!
@Not the IT Dept.:
I think Steve Bannon is auditioning for the role of Goebbels. Stephen Miller, despite the fact that he’s Jewish, may fit the part better.
@drj:
For sure. As Richard Neustadt and Ernest May explained in their masterwork Thinking in Time, when using historical analogs to analyze the present, we should both look at the ways in which the current instance is and is not like the precedent. Doing so can be quite illuminating.
It’s just the Hitler is sui generis because of the sheer level of evil associated with him. Even Mussolini doesn’t carry the same level of baggage.
Which explains why the hard-right Texas Supreme Court rubber-stamped Ken Paxton’s abuse of Kate Cox. These people are fanatics who really don’t care what the infidels think, and asserting power is a priority.
@charontwo:
@James Joyner:
Looking at the body count, you could make a good case that Mao Zedong was worse, he just doesn’t have that Hitler panache.
Also, Hitler had the power of a modern advanced technological state behind him, more than comparable others.
Mao would, with relish, watch his enemies tortured to death, something Hitler was way too squeamish for.
BTW, Mao’s wife, the “White Devil.” was a real piece of work too.
The question isn’t whether, at this point in time, Trump has done everything that Hitler did (world war, genocide, totalitarian rule, etc.). Instead, it’s whether the beast that is Trumpism has many of the same elements as fascism, to the point where it’s clear that it is fascism. The person who heads that movement isn’t naively steering it in a direction that he does not intend. So in that sense, the question of whether Trump has some Hitler-like ambitions (at the very least, the destruction of American democracy, and the shattering of the current world order), Hitler-like tactics (holding orgiastic mass rallies, preying on institutional and cultural weaknesses, duping conservative allies and eventually bringing them under his domination, creating a völkisch alternate universe that his followers eagerly inhabit), or a Hitler-like political narrative (evil forces plotting the destruction of the blood and soil foundation of the country, and only I can save you).
But that’s really a question of whether the Hitler comparison is apt. The other question you raise, James, is whether its prudent to raise it. We’ve seen fascism before, and we know what kind of disasters it brings. We can trace the natural course of fascist development, and some of the destinations it may reach (perhaps Nazism is at the far end of that course, Italian Fascism short of that awful terminus). We went to war to topple fascist regimes, and we built a world order that was designed, in large part, to prevent the return of that sort of tyranny. And now, when the re-emergence of the same forces is blatantly before our eyes, we shouldn’t say anything about it, because some presumed voters will clutch their pearls in horror at making the comparison? Because it might offend them to say, “It could happen here?”
How far this rule of, “Don’t make comparisons to odious historical figures,” should go. Should we nor compare Trump to George Wallace for stoking the fears of white Americans? Should we not compare Trump allies like Steve Bannon to Leninists, even though in Bannon’s own words he professes that he is copying Lenin’s approach? Should we not compare Bannon, Miller, Kelly, Giuliani, and others around Trump to the same type of has-beens, wannabes, criminals, and weirdos that surrounded fascist and authoritarian leaders in the past? Should we not compare Trump to Huey Long, for his ability to populist language effectively? Which of these stay within some threshold of innocuousness that won’t alienate your theoretical voters?
Apparently, many these voters who are capable of being alienated or persuaded don’t seem to be put off by the use of the F-word by Trump, who is leading in the polls despite calling his opponents “fascists,” or the bizarre mashup of “communists and fascists,” and other labels that certainly meet the odiousness standard. Rather than pearl-clutching, it has clearly led some part of the electorate to say, “As awful as this man is, let’s vote for him and hope for the best.” Which is, of course, the attitude that led German and Italian voters who had the same opinion down the road to disaster.
Americans are deeply ignorant of history. Not only do Americans not know the history of such exotic places as South America, Africa or India, they don’t even know European, or British history. And of course all they know of US history is the Declaration, the Civil War, WW2 and Vietnam, and of even those events, most of what they know is reductive bullshit.
Why Hitler? Because it’s one of about six historical names Americans even recognize.
@Kingdaddy:
They don’t think he is awful, they like his promises. They are too naive, too short-sighted to see that just because they like what he starts out doing, they might not like where it ultimately leads, or what his successors might prefer to do.
@Michael Reynolds:
I take it you have never heard of David Barton. Lot’s of these people know plenty of “history” that never really happened.
@Kingdaddy:
People tend to get fixated that the earlier Adolph started the biggest war in history and committed racial genocide. Anyone who doesn’t do that, is taken to be not like him.
The point is both Adolphs are committed to the supremacy of a given race and a hierarchical order largely based on race, and don’t care how they go about achieving it. Orange Adolph may not start a global war, nor tackle the world’s major powers, but he may start a war or two, say against Venezuela or Iran*. He may not try to wipe out any ethnic groups, but his anti-leadership on COVID has already led to hundreds of thousands of deaths of his own people.
*If he doesn’t, it will be because no generals will promise a quick victory, nor a war that can go on without Adolph doing a lot of work to see it through.
@charontwo:
I was going to say the same thing. They aren’t voting for Trump in spite of all these things, they are voting for Trump because of all these things.
I said back in 2016 “these people don’t want a President, they want an emperor” and nothing in their outlook has changed since.
@charontwo:
Take a page from the libertarian playbook: the government that has the power to do things for you, also has the power to do things to you.
@charontwo:
You don’t mean the Minutemen who launched a missile assault on the airports in the town of Gatwick during the Revolutionary Civil World War II in Vietnam, do you?
Whether Trump, or anybody else, is approaching Hitler-level awfulness is kinda irrelevant.
We should thank Trump for exposing weaknesses in our system, and for being stupid enough to not be able to navigate them to Hitler-level awfulness in this country.
As we have been saying for years, the next Trump won’t be a narcissistic idiot.
So we have this moment, for the next few months, to finish placing into law all the norms and traditions that used to keep people in check.
Since at least 1973, the presidency has been, in my view, unconstitutionally powerful. It’s time to rein that in and start forcing Congress to do its job.
Gack! I should have edited my comment more carefully. Apologies.
Old News Godwin did it before in 2015.
@Kathy:
Different issue, reflects Trump’s unusual reading disability creating problems when he uses a teleproprompter. I have a reference on that, don’t have time for it now.
David Barton is a fake “historian” who claims America was founded to be an explicitly Christian nation to embody Christian principles.
The real founding fathers wanted to avoid the kind of sectarian wars etc. that accompanied the Reformation in Europe, which they thought a state religion would trigger.
Here we all are, discussing this and wondering if it’s splitting hairs to suggest that while Trump wants to be a dictator, maybe the comparison to the World’s Worst Dictator current title holder are excessive.
IT’S INSANE THAT THIS IS OUR CURRENT CONDITION.
Seriously, we all need to take a step back and think about this. There should be absolutely no question at all that even dancing as close to the line as Trump is should be an immediate disqualifier. Immediate. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.
WTAF, Republicans. How is this our current reality???
@Paul L.: Should we assume this is from your blog, Kingdom of Idiots?
ETA: My apologies. I didn’t see the hot link earlier.
@charontwo: Mao and Stalin both give Hitler a run for his money in terms of body count. Hitler gets bonus points for launching a world war and fomenting the Holocaust.
The thing is that Hitler is pretty much inseparable from those events. So, while it’s true that both Hitler and Eisenhower introduced massive highway projects that still have an impact in their countries to this very day, bringing Hitler into the conversation just derails it.
@Kingdaddy: As noted in both the OP and my above response to @charon, I think Hitler, in particular, is essentially a distraction because he’s essentially the personification of evil.
That said, I agree with you fully here:
I think that’s useful analytically. I’m just skeptical that it’s useful rhetorically for reasons laid out above.
@charontwo:
Oh, that load of orange trump droppings.
The founders lived in the Enlightenment, which was a very secular era. Also the aftermath of Europe’s many, and awful, religious wars made separation of religion and state an urgent and important matter.
But regardless of what Jefferson, Washington, et. al. believed, fact is the Constitution does not mention either the Christian god, nor Christianity or Jesus, even once.
Some explicit Christian principles, right?
Yes, I know the claim is the evidence these days among the wingnuts (and, in truth, many others as well).
@James Joyner:
Hitler was Hitler because he had the power of the advanced German state backing him, plus lots of Germans, Poles, etc. happy to support the Jew/LGB/Romany/etc. bigotry/murdering.
Given similar opportunity, Donald J. Trump would be as spectacularly evil if not worse.
Elon Musk could do, too.
@charontwo:
Basically making the “steam engine time” case here – when the circumstances are right for Hitler, Hitler shows up. Which is sort of but not entirely true.
@Michael Reynolds:
True enough. But I’ve always wondered how we actually compare to other countries? I’ve traveled a lot and of course worked with many, many people not born here and the way it usually works is they say, “You Americans know so little about history. We are so much more educated than you, because we know all about US history, as well as Africa (meaning the few lands we colonized) and South America (again, colonized lands).” But a few times I’ve asked a European “what do you know about the relationship between Korea, China and Japan in the times around WWI and WWII?”, or a Chinese, “What were the dominant international naval forces in 1800?”, and gotten dumbstruck looks. The reality is that most people know about their own country, the ones immediately around them, the ones that had a big impact on their country’s history, and then also US history and to a lesser extent those of China and Russia.
@MarkedMan:
I was in French schools for the equivalent of 2d and 3d grades and we were talking about Vercingetorix, Charles Martel, Charlemagne and François I, that I remember. On the one hand, we’re talking 1964-ish, things may have changed. On the other hand, this wasn’t Paris, this was very humble Rochefort.
I agree though that the European comparison is sketchy. It’s like the whine that Americans only speak English. Well, yeah, in the same way Romans only spoke Latin, English is the international language. Plus a lot of Americans live a long, long way from a non-English speaking neighboring country.
@charontwo:
We all whine about the failures of the Constitution, but one thing that reassures in current circumstances, is federalism. Hitler did not have to deal with a German equivalent to the West Coast or the Northeast.
@James Joyner:
That may be true for Europeans and Americans but the reality is that there have been no shortage of personifications of evil before or since. We in the West just don’t care nearly as much about them. Mao and Stalin and Lenin and Pol Pot and Kim Il Sung and, well the list goes on and on for after WWII, and is uncountable for such people beforehand. I’ve long thought that making Hitler the sole source of the evil of WWII and the Shoah an absolute once-in-history abomination is a defense mechanism. Putting all blame on one person and holding his actions to be unique means we can put that era of history behind us. But we can’t. The reality is that while the impact of the Nazis and their counterparts in Italy and Japan were largish in scope, that was primarily a function of the application of modern machinery and transport to an age old travesty. Despots before and since have waged massacres upon innocents for longer periods of time and affecting larger percentages of populations in their sphere of influence.
By mechanically ranking abominations according to the number dead and declaring that comparisons cannot be made unless that number has been reached, we make it merely a game of statistics. The purpose of exploring these connections (as Kathy and several others has pointed out) is to identify them before they metastasize. As someone said earlier (I think it was you, James) it is important to examine these emerging despots to see both where they are similar and different to those of the past. And that includes how they are similar or different from Hitler as he rose to and consolidated power.
@Michael Reynolds:
One of the big errors in the Gibson movie “Passion of the Christ” is the Romans speak Latin. The real Romans in Judea spoke Greek, the “lingua franca” of that time.
@Michael Reynolds:
Do you mean that to reinforce my point about Europeans mostly learning about European history or to refute it?
As for English becoming one of the most dominant languages in the world, I think it is unique in that it was promulgated by a ruthless super power who conquered and subjugated huge swaths of the world, instilled the language, and then had the grace to diminish and retreat. They left behind countries that were much larger than the entities that were there before and so had many different ethnic groups and languages. Selecting one of those native languages as the national one would have caused problems, and there were too many to make them all official languages, so English often became the compromise. I know this is true for Ghana, for one.
@Kathy:
I’ve always liked the “rammed the ramparts” bit. I picture it like that thing Trump does leg humping an American flag.
@Kingdaddy:
I’ve never read Mein Kampf. I should. My understanding is that Hitler did express a sort of naive governing philosophy. I can’t see Trump has. I don’t see Trump as thinking he’s going to restore the U. S. to it’s rightful place in the world, or gain lebensraum from Mexico, or defeat Communism or anything.
Trump, by many accounts, started this in 2016 to boost his brand and almost accidentally discovered he could bullshit and manipulate his way to the top. He just wants to be at the top again, and when he is, this time he’s going to make sure everybody does what they’re told to support him. And he’ll be surrounded by scheming toadies trying to impress him while carving out their own fiefdoms. I don’t think it’s so much Trump wants to be an autocrat, or even has enough grasp of political philosophy to know what the word means, as he sees Putin, Xi, Orban, and others and thinks that’s how it should be. He’s the top dog, everybody does what he says.
Autocracy is kind of the easy downhill path for someone with no education, no guardrails, no self-awareness or self control, a history of succeeding just by bulling his way through, and sufficient power. And blood and soil populism is the easiest thing to sell.
@charontwo:
The eastern part of Rome’s empire was made up of many of the lands conquered by Alexander, and ruled thereafter by his Greek and Macedonian generals and their heirs. That’s how Greek became the common tongue in the Balkans, Greece (duh), much of the Middle East, and parts of North Africa.
The western part had been mostly under Roman domination (some parts under Carthaginian rule, and there were Greek colonies all over the place). So Latin was the common language in those parts.
When the empire split and the western part decayed and broke apart, the eastern part, referred to now as the Byzantine Empire, used Greek in official documents and the imperial court. But it called itself the Roman Empire.
And now I’m twice off topic. Yes, the Roman soldiers in Judea would have spoken Greek, as would the Roman officials and large chunks of the population.
@gVOR10:
I mentioned upthread that Trump has a reading disability. Here is the link, well worth reading:
https://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2019/07/its-literacy.html
@charontwo: That would explain a lot of things. So part of the equation is a candidate with an admitted and well controlled stutter and and someone hiding that he can barely read. I suppose it’s unfair, but while I make allowance for the stutter, I’ve never felt that it falls on me to try to interpret Trump’s gibberish into something coherent.
Wow. Just wow.
Kafkaesque.
You people need therapy.
@Jack:
Found any pedophile rings in pizza parlor basements lately, Franz? How about millions of stolen votes?
@Jack: “Ivanka’s got the best body. I’ve often said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter I’d be dating her.”
– Donald J. Trump
“Is it wrong to be more attracted to your daughter than your wife?”
– Donald J. Trump
Even therapy could not save you unpatriotic, perverted, pedophile-adoring deplorables nor your patholgical lying, Putin-puppet, Hitler-wannabe cult leader Trump — a thug who mocked a disabled reporter, trashed fallen US soldiers, wrote love letters to communist North Korea, tweeted a White Power video on 28 June 2020, worsened COVID’s outcomes with his dishonesty incompetence leading to mass death and record job loss, and incited the deadly Jan 6 terror attack with soreloser election lies rejected by his own party’s officials and audits.