by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
For all the talk by myself and others comparing Trump to Hitler, there’s one way where the two men are very different and that’s how Hitler would handled what’s going on right now. If Herr Hitler was feeling the long arm of the law just about to reach him and the Right was so primed and ready for political violence, he would lean into it.
Hitler at this point would go transactional.
Maybe he wouldn’t say it outloud, but he would tell the SA or SS to go out and knock some heads, or blow some shit up. I suppose the direct analogy would be if Trump told the Proud Boys directly to commit some political violence immediately in an effort to make everyone so mad that it was practically impossible for the government to prosecute him.
Usually, Trump escapes from justice no matter how bad he is. But two things are at play at the moment. One is, there are just so many different investigations into him that it’s almost inevitable that one of them is going to hit pay dirt and really bring Trump closer to justice. Of course, in that instance, Trump can just laugh at all of us by announcing his 2024 bid and scream at the top of his lungs that he’s a poor, poor martyr for the cause. (This, of course, is very much something that Hitler would do in this situation.)
The other is — we still don’t know how bad the Mar-a-Lago situation is. As Stephen Colbert frequently says, with Trump things are always, always far, far worse than you fear. As such, if Trump really was up to something Very Bad with all those classified documents at Mar-a-Lago we really are going to risk maybe not a civil war, but some of that rolling political violence that people like Barbara F. Walter keeps talking about.
The reason is — two absolutes would smash into each other.
The absolute need for the government to protect national security would smash into the absolute need on the part of MAGA to protect the Fuhrer. And if Trump poured gas on this particular situation by going transactional, then we really, really are in a lot of trouble not in late 2024, early 2025, but RIGHT NOW.
