Vice President JD Vance demands Democrats “stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi” if they want to end political violence in the United States.
I think President Donald Trump, Vice President Vance and MAGA world have their feelings hurt. These are the national leaders who call Democrats and liberals “scum,” “crazy,” “sick,” “perverted,” “animals,” “communists” and “socialists” — and they want us to stop calling them “Nazis.”
The vice president makes the mistake of claiming all Democrats call all MAGA people a bunch of Nazis. This is a false statement, a lie. Vance’s strategy is an attempt to claim the “Nazi” charge can’t possibly be true.
Rodney Kennedy
Rhetorical scholar and demagogue expert Patricia Roberts-Miller offers an excellent entre into the use of the word “Nazi” to describe one’s enemies.
Calling an opponent a “Nazi” may be a matter of disagreement caught in the emotions of anger and contempt. Miller-Roberts says, “Argumentation theorists call it the fallacy of argumentum ad Hiterlerum, when someone tries to discredit a policy, argument or opponent by accusing them of being just like Hitler.”
I appreciate Vance broaching the Nazi charge. In 1939, Kenneth Burke said of Hitler: “Here is the testament of a man who swung a great people into his wake. Let us watch it carefully; and let us watch it, not merely to discover some grounds for prophesying what political move is to follow Munich, and what move to follow that move, etc.; let us try also to discover what kind of ‘medicine’ this medicine-man has concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America.”
This investigation will strenuously exclude all the unnecessary suspects and all the peripheral evidence. My interest here is only in whether some Americans exhibit Nazi-like tendencies.
Burke points out Hitler found a panacea, a “cure for what ails you,” a “snake oil,” that made such sinister unifying possible within his own nation. “And he was helpful enough to put his cards face up on the table, that we might examine his hands. Let us, then, for God’s sake, examine them. This book is the well of Nazi magic; crude magic, but effective. A people trained in pragmatism should want to inspect this magic.”
My beginning point is that Hitler and the Nazis were disastrous for Germany. Therefore, we should want to understand what happened, how they rose to power, destroyed democracy, started the most destructive war in history, drug Germany into self-immolation and deliberately carried out serial genocides.
“There are three overarching similarities between Trump and Hitler, MAGA and the Nazi Party.”
Just how much is Trumpism infected with the Nazi spirit? There are three overarching similarities between Trump and Hitler, MAGA and the Nazi Party.
Nazi rhetoric: Donald Trump and Stephen Miller can’t seem to stop talking like Nazis. Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comment comes straight from Hitler. Trump, of course, employed his favorite trope, paralipsis, to deny the statement had anything to do with Hitler.
Appearance vs. reality: Trump is a media genius, a man adept at creating an apparent identity, an image, as was Hitler for his time. He has convinced people he is the most innocent man in the world even though he is a convicted felon. His persona, like Hitler’s, is a strong man chosen by God for a divine mission. Yet he is a crook, a liar and a convict.
Lies vs. the truth: In 1930s Germany there was a public despising of truth in favor of the lies Hitler told. Hitler was honest about his lying. Robert Citino, American military historian and the Samuel Zemurray Stone Senior Historian at the National World War II Museum says of Hitler: “He rarely lied about his intentions. Of all the world statesman of the 20th century, he may have been the most honest of all. He proclaimed his goals to the German people and to the world, leaving a dense trail of written statements and public proclamations behind him that are still remarkable for their candor.”
With Donald Trump, nothing screams “Nazi Medicine Man” like his habit of lying. Trump lies openly and publicly and his people know he is lying, but they trust him. How Hitler! One of his supporters swore, “At least Trump is honest about his lying!”
If Donald Trump and MAGA check these Nazi rhetorical strategies, they can indeed be called “Nazis.” And we will have to politely decline Vice- President Vance’s insistence that we stop calling his people anything less.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit and Dissenting from Donald Trump While Listening to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
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