I do see your point, and it makes sense, but ironically, that could be a problem. The subtlety and rationality of it are lost on the rabid, ignorant consumers of reality TV.
I’ve lamented about this on Facebook and to some degree here. I don’t know what to do about willful ignorance. This post-truth world is very upsetting to me.
Avoiding Trump completely, these are the significant dates.
Prior to 1933 you certainly have large swathes of the German population vigorously opposing the Nazis. Indeed, it’s often seen as one of the weaknesses of Weimar that you’d had open street-fighting between the Communists and the Nazis. People were prepared to get bloody. Significant demographics, including cities like Berlin, were utterly opposed to the rise of Hitler. Which included publishing satirical takedowns.
The brief period between January 1933 and the Reichstag fire is complicated. Hitler pretends to be a normal Chancellor. Granted with crackdowns on the leftwing press and an emboldened SA heartily beating opponents with extra enthusiasm.
The Reichstag fire then changes everything. Hitler declares an emergency and essentially assumes dictatorial powers. That’s the point from which you can then be punished merely for making jokes.
One story about that shift was the one told by Klaus Fuchs - most famous as the Soviet spy in Los Alamos. A student Communist, who’d previously been seriously beat up by the SA, he’d continued to distribute Party newspapers even after the ban when Hitler had come to power. But he learnt of the Reichstag fire by reading a newspaper on a train the morning after. He immediately surreptitiously removed the Party badge he was wearing. Then fled into exile.
So, provided you were brave enough, you could even flaunt you Party adherence into March 1933. But, after the fire, essentially all opposition is suppressed. Including people making jokes.
Then we’d better be sure no one burns something like the White House down in protest, or this will be no joke.
I feel your pain. Literally. I’ve had a knot in my stomach since the election. Setting a G.I. doc week after next. 
I’ve found this article to be very interesting on the topic of Hitler, and how he was perceived by the American press and some German people.
Here’s a source that gives a pretty good and concise general rundown:
Comparing Trump to Hitler is willful ignorance. Hitlers mission in life was to lead the German people to what he considered their glorious destiny. He didn’t pursue wealth, women or fame. Hitler openly told the world what he would do in Mein Kampf. Hitler consolidated all power around himself.
Trump does none of these things.
We live in an age of historical ignorance. The net has given everyone what is essentially an equally powerful voice. Their is no modern leader who can be compared to Hitler because Hitler appeared in about the only time period he could achieve power.
To me, any American dictator will come from the left. I mean if Obama had decided to stay on another 4 years and simply ignored the constitution, what would have stopped him? Not the DNC. Not the left. Not the college students. Not the press.
And if he decided thru mandate to throw some of the opposition in jail for say, being against gay rights, the left would have applauded.
I disagree both with your general idea and with your specific example.
Obama wouldn’t have done that, because he is a man whose core values would not permit it. Your example is like saying, “What if the Pope decided to open a chain of abortion clinics?”
A dictator wouldn’t come from the left, because the left is all about tolerance, inclusion, and protection of individual rights.
Unless you disagree with them.
It was a bit more pro-active than that implies, and something that happened from the outset: violence against perceived enemies was, to a fair degree, as much the point as the windy rhetoric, not only as a means of creating a presence and a sense of action/movement, but as a demonstration of power, much as fascist parties elsewhere set out to disrupt leftwing meetings and to intimidate Jews and anyone else they disapproved of. Don’t forget the attempted Munich coup of 1923, and note that (notwithstanding the parliamentary manoeuvres that got Hitler into the Chancellery) the takeover was always characterised as a revolution.
Everything that Obama did during the last 8 years that came from a political motivation, even the worst of it, absolutely pales in comparison to what Trump has done in the first week. To say that the left is capable of ignoring the rights of those they politically disagree with is a huge false equivalency. The equivalent would be turning back planes full of Trump supporters at the border. Or going in with guns blazing against actual armed insurrectionists instead of simply dispersing them and arresting the leaders. Or openly proclaiming that they would do everything in their power to make Trump’s presidency fail (instead, every Congressperson I am aware of says they will support his proposals that are good for the nation.)
No, a dictator wouldn’t come from the left at all, because, by definition, leftist principles are against forcible control of people’s lives and minds. Your agreement or disagreement with them is completely irrelevant. The principles held by leaders on the left are not affected by whether people agree with the principles.
I’m firmly pro-democratic and pro-liberal and anti-Trump, and I think you’re being a bit naive here. I think the real danger of fascism is not in the person of Trump but of Steve Bannon. And there’s no reason that someone like that couldn’t exist on the left. Greed and ego and venality and evil and stupidity aren’t a right-wing monopoly.
Obama would never become a dictator. But neither would John McCain.
Try telling that to a Stalinist. Or a Trotskyite. Or a Leninist.
Uh…Dachau? Bergen-Belsen? Buchenwald? Ebensee? (By no means an exhaustive list of those found in Germany.)
Trump is much more like Il Duce, hence the appropriation of the Il Douche epithet. The comparison to Hitler is actually in the way both came to power, through the (on one hand) very real economic hardships Germany went through post-WWI thanks to the Treaty of Versailles and the imagined ones Trump touted and cashed in on last year, and the perceived inability to achieve anything by the Weimar government and ours.
ETA: Man, that was one long, run-on sentence. But grammatically correct.
None of those were extermination camps
Ftr…they were Majdenek, Auschwitz Birkenau, Treblinka, Chelmno and Sobibor.