After a few years of parenting, you like to think that you're prepared for most of the playground hurts and disagreements that are going to come your way. After all, I've handled skinned knees, successfully negotiated who gets to be Spider-Man and who has to be Doctor Doom, and didn't blink an eye when the toddler got stuck in the toilet while trying to wash his hair.
But of all the things that I was expecting to hear when my ten-year-old son came inside the other day, out-of-breath and near tears from a fight with a friend, the possibility that Donald Trump was at the root of the problem was the last thing on my mind.
“They said I was Hitler,” he sobbed. “Sarah and Evan. They said I was Hitler because I like Donald Trump.”
For the record, Sarah and Evan are nine and seven years old, respectively. The reason my son likes Donald Trump is because he heard me relate the Batman story from Trump's trip to Iowa—when he told a nine-year-old boy he was, in fact, Batman—and because several family members are vocal supporters.
As this experience with my son shows, the “Trump equals Hitler” meme has penetrated culture so deeply, to the point that it's being applied on the playground.
This may be the first recorded example of a ten-year-old kid being called Hitler for supporting Trump, but the comparison between the Republican candidate for President and the notorious dictator has become so familiar that it verges on parody.
In March, the Jerusalem Post even published a short list of celebrities who had recently equated Trump to Hitler, including: Louis C.K., Bill Maher, Glenn Beck, most of the ladies on “The View”, and the cast of “Saturday Night Live”.
Searching Twitter for “Trump and Nazi” or “Hitler” comparisons brings up a staggering number of results. There's even an @Trump=Hitler account which contains graphic content.
And while one might think calling one's political opponents “Nazis” or “fascists” is a habit of the Left, one of the most startling examples comes from Citizen SuperPAC, a right-leaning political action committee that supports Ted Cruz, and funded an ad called “Heil Trump” that makes generous use of footage of Hitler spliced with Trump.
It's a comparison that never fails to irritate Trump's supporters, who are quick to point out the substantial difference between the Holocaust and having political positions that people disagree with.
While happy to debate or defend their candidate's stance on immigration or the public statements that have spurred the Hitler comparison, they say the Trump=Hitler talking point is deeply insulting to the people who fought and died in World War II. One reddit commentor writes:
“I have friends there whose parents/grandparents lived while that lunatic [Hitler] was in power and it infuriates them more than you can possibly imagine, that this comparison is so freely and openly tossed around in American media. It is an insult not only to Donald Trump but to history, the victims, and the entire country of Germany.”
However, even those who aren't supporters object to the analogy.
James Marshall Crotty, writing in Huffington Post, calls the Trump/Hitler equivalence, “the worst kind of hate speech,” and worries about how such extreme rhetoric can affect politics as a whole.
Even MTV urged people to use more temperate language and stop invoking Nazis in discussions about Trump's “rise to power.”
According to NPR, the Trump=Hitler meme demonstrates the way social media immediacy and brevity forestall any thoughtful political discussion. When you only have a picture or 140 characters, but feel driven to respond, the most extreme reaction is going to win out.
But try to explain that to a distraught little boy who thinks his friends now consider him on par with Captain America's greatest enemy. So I did what any mother would do in the situation. I explained the nuances of the immigration debate, pointed out to my son that he was still a kid and not in any way responsible for the systematic slaughter of millions, and told him that there were fresh cookies on the table.
Fortunately, one of those things worked.
