Normally you’d have to go to an idiots’ roost such as an undergraduate politics seminar, or CNN, to find a series of thoughts as hyperbolic and inane as those presented in The Meaning of Hitler, the new Donald Trump documentary.
After six years of outlandish Hitler–Trump comparisons, I was looking forward to a film that might recenter us all on the actual Nazi horror show, to which nothing can be compared except other gargantuan acts of mass murder carried out by Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Instead, I had scarcely settled in my chair before I heard Martin Amis telling me, “We might as well get on with [Hitler’s] similarities with Trump.” Amis is a towering intellectual who has studied Hitlerism and Stalinism extensively and written books on each, and he has absolutely no excuse for trivializing the Shoah like this. Amis goes on to cite these two Hitler–Trump similarities: “fanatical cleanliness . . . and of course lying is another.”
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