A friendly reader of Cafe Hayek just wrote to me to complain of my – in today’s “Some Links” – equating Trump with Hitler. I was initially baffled by this reader’s accusation, for while I’m no fan of Donald Trump, I emphatically do not believe him to be a modern-day Hitler. Having nothing remotely close to any such sentiment – in fact, feeling active disgust at individuals who do suggest that Trump is Hiter-like or Hitler-lite – I couldn’t imagine what prompted my correspondent’s note.
Then I realized that my correspondent innocently misread a part of Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker’s column that I quoted. In that quote, Baker does mention Hitler surviving attempts on his life. But Baker’s point is that no one should read divine intervention into Trump surviving the assassination attempt; no one should suppose that Trump’s survival signals heaven’s endorsement of the MAGA agenda. (Nor, by the way, should anyone read into the fact that an assassin nearly killed Donald Trump any sign of heavenly hostility to Trump.) The wannabe assassin simply missed his target. That’s it.
To read divine intervention into Trump’s survival, says Baker, makes no more sense than to read divine intervention into Hitler’s survival of assassination attempts. These are human events that are easily and fully explained by human imperfection.
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To mention Hitler in any context courts confusion. I was inattentive to that possibility when choosing to share that part of Baker’s column. Because it’s up – and because I believe that any fair reading of it does not reveal an equation of Trump with Hitler – I’ll not take it down. But I say again, for the record, that I sincerely do not believe that Trump is Hitleresque or otherwise akin to Hitler. And at the risk of unintentionally offending some of my NeverTrump friends, I also believe that suggestions that Trump is Hitleresque, and that MAGA is “NAZI” spelled differently, are not only wildly mistaken, but irresponsible and offensive.
