If you thought that leftists were through with likening Donald Trump to Hitler after their insane and hysterical rhetoric contributed mightily to their catastrophic losses in the 2024 election, think again. On Saturday, Rep. James Clyburn (D-Nazi Hunter) dragged out this hoary and stupid canard yet again on Fox News Channel’s “Cavuto Live,” signaling that the Führer is not likely to be allowed to return to the dustbin of history anytime over the coming four years.
Clyburn wants us to know that he has studied history, and that therefore we should take his warning with the utmost seriousness. He told Neil Cavuto that the country had clearly lurched to the right in the recent election, and added: “I hope it’s not going as far right as that which happened in Germany in the 1930s, which, you may remember, I forewarned way back in 2018 that I saw this coming. I’ve studied history all of my life.… And I can tell you what I said back in 2018 on another network is now coming to pass. People chastised me for saying it at that time, but now they are seeing it.”
He did indeed give us the same warning back in 2018, saying back then: “Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. And he went about the business of discrediting institutions to the point that people bought into [it]. Nobody would have believed it now. But swastikas hung in churches throughout Germany. We had better be very careful.” Maybe Clyburn was “chastised” for saying this because it didn’t make any sense and wasn’t even accurate on its face.
Clyburn demonstrates his ignorance first off by claiming that Hitler was “elected chancellor of Germany.” The Weimar Republic didn’t hold direct elections for chancellor. Modern Germany doesn’t, either. The chancellor of Germany is akin to the British prime minister: he or she is usually the leader of the majority party in the nation’s parliament, the Bundestag, or Reichstag, as it was known in Hitler’s day. In Weimar Germany, the president appointed the chancellor; if no party had a Reichstag majority, he would appoint the representative of the leading party or the leader of a coalition.
In Jan. 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, his National Socialist party was indeed the largest party in the Reichstag, but the largest percentage of the vote it got before Hitler took power was only 37.3%. Hitler was appointed chancellor as the leader of a coalition that was supposed to restrain him, a task at which it signally failed. Hitler then prevailed upon the Reichstag, after the highly suspicious fire in the Reichstag building that he blamed on the Communists, allowing him to expel them from the assembly, to grant him dictatorial powers that were ostensibly only temporary, in light of the national emergency.
Is Trump going to do anything like that? Come on, man! There is not even any mechanism for doing such a thing in the American governmental system, while the Weimar constitutional always contained this poison pill that ultimately led to its destruction. Taking advantage of his new powers, Hitler quickly outlawed all political parties except his own, so that Germany was a one-party state by the time of the sham Reichstag elections of Nov. 1933.
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Does Clyburn know any of this? Almost certainly not. And Cavuto, like most Americans, had had enough, asking him: “Are you envisioning another Hitler? Is that what you’re saying?” Clyburn doubled down: “That’s exactly what I’m saying. I said the 1930s in Germany. And, of course, — and we can go to Mussolini in Italy. These things —” At that point, Cavuto said this was hyperbolic. He should have said it was hysterical and quite spectacularly insane. But Clyburn was ready to triple down: “You may think so. I’ll tell you what’s hyperbolic, is asking the Senate to approve all your nominees without any vetting. That’s what’s hyperbolic.”
I’ll tell you what’s hyperbolic, Clyburn: it’s exaggerating your claims to the point of ridiculousness. Look up the word when you get around actually to studying what Hitler did. You’ll find that it has nothing to do with asking the Senate to approve nominees without vetting. You may find that objectionable, although it’s perfectly constitutional, but it’s absolutely nothing like staging a false flag attack in order to justify taking steps toward the criminalization of legitimate opposition. You ought to know all about that, as you and your Democrat colleagues did it for four years over your phony Jan. 6 “insurrection.” If you want some Hitler parallels in the present day, study the “Reichstag Fire” and compare it carefully to Jan. 6. You might find the comparison enlightening.
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