Has Trump Repealed Godwin’s Law?

Politics & Elections
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With the term “fascist” being tossed about repeatedly these days (and IMO accurately) to describe Trump’s political philosophy, and the word “Hitler” being attributed to him as a term of praise and admiration, are we free to use those words without being accused of violating Godwin’s Law? I think so.

The idea that “Hitler” and “fascism” were lazy descriptors-- employed far too freely by left-wingers to characterize any and all centrist-to-conservative positions which they opposed, and so whenever they appear in discourse marks the point of the left-winger resorting to sloppy calumny and cheap debating tricks-- no longer applies. “Hitler” and “fascist” are now, again, accurate terms to apply to Trump and his ilk, and in their more revealing moments, they agree with the accuracy of such terms, openly voicing their admiration for Hitler and Naziism, wondering aloud if Hitler didn’t get some things right, questioning the role that Jews play in a Christian society, and so on. Mostly, though, they still try to hide their positive view of fascism, at least in public and in their more guarded moments.

They’ve tried to turn “Trump Derangement Syndrome” into a new type of Godwin’s Law in which mentioning Trump and what one finds vile in his behavior and his actions marks the speaker as “deranged,” causing Trump’s supporters to claim victory at the first word of harsh criticism to be fired in his general direction. It is a sort of pre-emptive muzzling that I interpret as a withdrawal from any discussion of Trump, a concession that you’re raising topics or making points that Trump supporters cannot entertain.

2

I would very much like to see and hear Trump say these things. Is this all “he said that…” or was he recorded saying any of this?
I do believe that if he said, “I wish I had generals like Hitler”, I’d like him to meet his Rommel.
Anyone who said, “Hitler got some things right” is a Nazi and or an idiot, Godwin does not apply.

3

The Votemaster today has a list of criteria to distinguish fascists from run of the mill authoritarians. Trump checks all the boxes but one: competence. They think that Trump is too incompetent to establish a dictatorship. They mention that he reacts badly when he feels he’s being played and will not carry out project 2025. He would be a terrible president of course. He will likely create a disastrous depression with his tariff.

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“Godwin’s Law” was always a toxic concept that enabled and shielded fascism. It outright encouraged fascism by ensuring that the closer to fascism someone talked and acted, the more immune they were to criticism thanks to a shield of people screaming “Godwin’s Law!” “Godwin’s Law!”

The real meaning of Godwin’s Law was always “Fascists should not be disrespected, defied or criticized”.

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But not the original meaning. Wiki:

Promulgated by the American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990, Godwin’s law originally referred specifically to Usenet newsgroup discussions. He stated that he introduced Godwin’s law in 1990 as an experiment in memetics, specifically to address the ubiquity of such comparisons which he believes regrettably trivialize the Holocaust.

“Although deliberately framed as if it were a law of nature or of mathematics, its purpose has always been rhetorical and pedagogical: I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler to think a bit harder about the Holocaust.”

  • Quoted in “I Seem to Be a Verb: 18 Years of Godwin’s Law”

My take: usenet libertarians made all sorts of glib comparisons to Nazis. This was a way of making fun of those prone to hyperbole. As for Trump, I’ll call him a fascist within lefty or liberal circles because those who conspire against democracy and run on a platform of Mass Deportation are fascists: think Mussolini not Hitler. In a more general audience I prefer terms like, “Tinpot Tyrant”, or “Wannabe tyrant”.

More from wiki:

Godwin rejects the idea that whoever invokes Godwin’s law has lost the argument, and suggests that, applied appropriately, the rule “should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter.” Godwin said that making comparisons to Hitler would actually be appropriate under the right circumstances:

“I urge people to develop enough perspective to do it thoughtfully. If you think the comparison is valid, and you’ve given it some thought, do it. All I ask you to do is think about the human beings capable of acting very badly. We have to keep the magnitude of those events in mind, and not be glib. Our society needs to be more humane, more civilized and to grow up.”

Me: the idea that someone who invokes Godwin’s law automatically wins the argument has always been a joke, one I’ve made on this message board a couple of times. That’s not the way arguments work.

ETA:

I would ask for an example, but I’ve seen it used that way as well and I can’t think of one. I say call things what they are within left of center circles. There are Nazis adjacent to Trump (one running for the Governor of North Carolina apparently), but there’s no evidence that Trump is proposing or thinks he can get away with the mass murder of US residents. If he does, I’ll be rhetorically prepared.

So fascist, not Nazi.

ETA2: Many Hitler comparisons are inane. There are lots of genocidal tyrants like Pol Pot and Slobodan Milosevic: why don’t they get any love?

ETA3: Looks like Whack-a-Mole provided us with an example.

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But in practice, that’s how I’ve seen it consistently used; to defend fascism.

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A friend of mine is a Trumper. We were talking politics over dinner and I mentioned Hitler obliquely and she immediately pushed back hard. I had Godwinized the discussion and there it would end.

I let it go that time. I have decided I will not let it be shutdown again like that (if I get the chance).

Sometimes the shoe fits and it does here.

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Before realizing that Trump has an Hitler obsession, I thought he could not be much like Hitler because of the difference, between parliamentary and presidential systems, in how they deteriorate into authoritarianism.

But now that we know Trump privately talks about Hitler a lot, it is hard not to bring it up.

Godwin’s Law has been dead for a while, but if it was still alive, Trump would have killed it.

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One reply: “I was speaking of Mussolini!”

Another: “Hey, Trump brought it up! He wants Hitler’s generals, you know the ones who lost WWII.”

Also, if you want an example of dictator who first won in a not-entirely-rigged election, that would be Hugo Chavez (1998) or maybe Robert Mugabe (1980).

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Nazi adjacent: From twitter-X : @MrRaceBannon (18K followers) says: “I dunno if Trump is America’s Hitler, but Nazis sure think he is.”

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Trump has used, and is using, classic fascist rhetoric that can be traced back to the 30s and 40s and was used by classic fascist examples like Hitler and Mussolini.

Last year Trump used the phrase “poisoning the blood of our country.” This is a phrase lifted directly from Mein Kampf.

Trump then repeated the use of “poisoning” in a post on his social media website Truth Social, saying overnight in an all-caps post, that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”
The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Mein Kampf,” in which he criticized immigration and the mixing of races. “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.

Trump has also used the word ‘vermin’ when referencing ‘radical leftists.’

The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

Anyone who tries to bring up Godwin’s law in regards to trump, is trying to shut down legitimate criticism and obfuscate actual facts that can be documented. And they are either ignorant, or they secretly support this bullshit.

Trump is literally quoting Hitler while engaging in political rhetoric. How much more legitimate can you get?

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I defer to the preeminent authority on Godwin’s Law.

I.e., Godwin.

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It’s as if he’s playing games to test what we’ll let him get away with. “How about if I dress up in a Storm Trooper outfit and grow a toothbrush mustache? And start talking German?”

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In that case, you might discuss Trump and his authoritarian tendencies and his interest in being a dictator without referring to fascism or Hitler.

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There’s an XKCD for everything.

But yeah,Trump is a right-wing authoritarian nationalist who wants strong state control to oppress the Other, in an attempt to bring back the nation’s past days of glory. That’s exactly what “fascism” is. He’s not exactly like Hitler, but then, Mussolini and Franco weren’t exactly like Hitler, either.

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The word “exactly,” I think, is where the defenders of fascism get you. Even if you managed to clone Hitler and run him for president, they’d claim with considerable volume and outrage that the 2020s are not the 1940s, and that so much has changed that Hitler isn’t Hitler any more.

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Which hands the advantage to the fascists, since it both helps them pretend not to be fascists and forbids you from making much of an argument about why their positions are bad ones in the first place.

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Godwin on Trump

“Will Trump succeed in being crowned “dictator for a day”? I hope not. But I choose to take Trump’s increasingly heedless transgressiveness — and, yes, I really do think he knows what he’s doing — as a positive development in one sense: More and more of us can see in his cynical rhetoric precisely the kind of dictator he aims to be.“

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/20/godwins-law-trump-hitler-comparisons/

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There’s definitely some semblance of The Boy Who Cried Wolf’s Lair here.

Would anybody like to tally up the number of times that Trump and his mouthpieces have called Biden, Harris, or the Dems writ large “Communists,” “Fascists,” “Marxists,” or “Socialists,” though?

And – as always – the truth about Trump is always worse than the lies about the Democrats.

“If you take a shot at the King …,” IMHO, does have a parallel in blithely invoking Hitler’s name (far more so than ‘Fascist,’ used generically) to characterize a politician. I think it has a short shelf life and ought to be used with extreme discernment.

Was it weakened in the last 50+ years? Maybe. Maybe a little. Is part of its current ‘weakness’ the fact that – like so many things – what we see as a bug, his supporters tend to view as a feature?

That, too.

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Oh. One other important reminder.

If it’s good enough for Trump’s VP pick, then it should be plenty good enough for all of us:

J.D. Vance once compared Trump to Hitler. Now they are running mates