Donald J. Trump is the President of the United States.
But if you spend any time at all on the internet reading liberal blogs or any time watching liberal TV shows like this one, you may have heard him described as the second coming of well, pretty much every dictator ever… even fictional ones, like Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter books.
Adam Johnson from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has done the legwork and found that Donald Trump has been compared to - at a minimum - Ayatollah Khomeini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Kim Jong-Il.
Those comparisons made some buzz in media circles - but if any Trump-dictator comparison has really captivated the public as a whole - it's the comparison of Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Go to an anti-Trump protest, and you'll see hundreds if not thousands of signs calling him a fascist, the Fuhrer and a Nazi.
Even real American Nazis think Trump is a Nazi.
For example, when neo-Nazi leader Richard Spencer opened a recent speech with a cry of "Hail Trump", he was greeted with a flurry of enthusiastic Nazi salutes.
Meanwhile, history books about the Nazis, WW2 and totalitarianism are flying off the shelves.
People are really - honestly - genuinely - concerned about our democratic republic becoming totalitarian state - specifically a fascist totalitarian state - under the rule of Donald Trump.
On the one hand - this idea that Trump is Hitler seems pretty ridiculous.
After all, just 10 years ago liberals everywhere were calling George W. Bush Hitler - and he was gone within the year.
Yes, Bush gave us the Patriot Act, an illegal war in Iraq, and an immensely more powerful Deep State - but he also handed his office over to Barack Obama like every other US president has handed over power to his successor: peacefully.
Donald Trump will in all likelihood leave power after his term in office in the exact same way.
But then again - there IS something different about Trump.
His naked appeals to white supremacy, his demonization of minority groups, and the way he glorifies autocracy for its own sake - they're like nothing we've seen before at the presidential level in American politics - at least not recently and at least not at this high of a level.
So what's actually going on here?
Is Trump Hitler?
Or is he just another right-wing Republican?
