Where would America be without hyperbole? From the chutzpah of the City Upon a Hill speech aboard the Arbella to the skirmish-turned Boston “massacre” to American Carnage a few years ago to the ongoing beatification of Charlie Kirk, it’s fair to say that without hyperbole, America would be more like a sprawly humble Saskatchewan than the Galactic Empire it’s become.
Did newscasters really say that Jimmy Kimmel’s return monologue would be a “marker in late-night show history”? That it would be “a huge moment in American history”? (They did). Excuse me, Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, Pearl Harbor, V-J Day, Cuban Missile Crisis, MLK, Malcolm X, Watergate, 9/11, Obama and Trump elections, please make room for Jimmy Kimmel’s 15 minutes.
One reigning hyperbole is the Hitler trope. Reactionaries and apologists for Trump’s regime rage when he is compared with the likes of Hitler or Mussolini, or when he’s called a fascist. They’re half right. There’s no comparison with those mass murderers. Not yet, anyway. (Watch Trump’s venously insufficient hand on The Button: as his senescence continues to slip on the peels of his banana republic, he may yet outdo every mass murderer in history, though I was encouraged by a few seconds’ coherence in his UN speech this week when he spoke almost like Ronald Reagan about the world-ending horror of nuclear armageddon.)[1]
Outlandish comparisons are limiting, not illustrative. They beg their own implausibility, so they’re useless, and they’re easily dismissed, in this case making Trump’s critics look even more deranged than his supporters. Trump’s supporters nevertheless love the comparisons at some level, for the simple reason that because they focus the left’s criticism on sensational but absurd hyperbole, they give their man a smokescreen, freeing him to carry out the more substantial demolition of American democracy. His critics are his best foil, if not–given the Democratic Party’s Origen-like self-emasculation–his best friends.
The demolition has nothing to distinguish it from fascism as defined even in the Merriam-Webster dictionaries Ron DeSantis’s Education Department hasn’t gotten around to censoring: “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
Every one of these examples is now the daily reality of Trump’s America. You might accuse me of hyperbole, though I am writing this paragraph the morning of Trump’s indictment of James Comey, the former FBI director, even after federal prosecutors found insufficient evidence for an indictment, as Trump checks off his enemies’ list as ICE continues its indiscriminate ethnic cleansing while forcing local police to join the organized goonery, as major law firms and universities across the country, like the networks’ news and entertainment divisions, cower, as public and private employees are fired for expressing opinions on their own social media, as the Attorney General frenchkisses the language of mobsters and Trump pursues vendettas like a modern-day fox hunt while enriching himself the way of Marcos, Mobutu, Duvalier and Milosevic, emolument clause be damned.
He is no Hitler. He doesn’t have to be. He is Trump. It is catastrophic enough. We don’t have to go chasing after comparisons. As always, American-made tells the tale all its own, redefining the brutality of hubris for its own version of that white nationalist supremacy Kirk championed.
And no, there is no left-wing equivalent in this country of compulsive equivalencies that seek to rationalize extremes by whataboutism. Not anything close. Heaven knows the left has its problems, its cancel culture, its insufferable wokism, its liberalism of sanctimony. But this is where the right gets into hyperbolic comparisons of idiocies and excesses the size of gnats to trumpism’s brontosaurus-sized razing of American norms.[2]
In his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, its title both a warning and a hope, Sinclair Lewis wanted to show what the United States would be like under a fascist regime with an American twist,[3] the way Philip Roth did even better with The Plot Against America in 2004. The novels were successful because they were essentially American reimaginings–not of the Third Reich, but of American democracy when it fails, when its worst instincts–its grimmer hyperboles–take over.
You can see Kirk- and Trump-like characters in both books (Charles Coughlin and Burton Wheeler in Plot, Buzz Windrip and Bishop Paul Peter Prang in Can’t Happen) because those are recurring American characters that our penchant for extremism–hyperbole as politics–has always produced: Even the Aliens and Sedition Acts, two of the most totalitarian laws of our history, bore the signature of that most august of founders and preachers of liberty, John Adams. Trump is merely outing a latent tradition.
In an interview about his book in 1936,[4] Lewis said no, “it can’t happen here so long as the government remembers that men and women are human beings with rights to be preserved and privileges to be enjoyed.” The struggle was not even between communism and fascism but “between tolerance and bigotry.” He could have been speaking in 2025.
He was more hopeful than we have a right to be: “It rests with the liberals and the tolerant to preserve our civillzation. Everything of importance in this world has been accomplished by the free inquiring spirit and the preservation of that spirit is more important than any social system. That spirit must prevail. So long as it does it won’t happen here.”
What happens when that spirit no longer prevails? You are living through it. It is happening here. I doubt that’s hyperbole.
Footnotes:
[1] “We want to have a cessation of the development of nuclear weapons,” Trump said. “We know and I know and I get to view it all the time, “Sir, would you like to see?” And I look at weapons that are so powerful that we just can’t ever use them. If we ever use them, the world literally might come to an end. There would be no United Nations to be talking about. There would be no nothing.”
[2] Gaza is a timely metaphor that is nothing like a metaphor. The mass-murdering Netanyahu (who has more in common with Hitler than Trump does) is literally razing Gaza building by building and genocidally eliminating as much of the Palestinian population as he can, the end game being the expulsion from Gaza of what Palestinians remain since they’d have no house to go back to, and for so many, no parents to go back to. Yet in the prevailing American narrative it is Hamas and the Palestinians who remain the aggressors, with Oct. 7 and the hostages providing unceasing justification to respond with a holocaust. American morals are so bankrupt that we generally accept a narrative that makes Trumpism seem as normal, as American, as mass shootings.
[3] It didn’t stop Hitler in 1937 from celebrating the fourth anniversary of taking power by banning the German translation of It Can’t Happen Here, published in Amsterdam as Das Ist Bel Uns Nicht Moeglich.
[4] At the time FDR was being called a fascist by the likes of Father Coughlin, a master of disinformation whose Christian populism shared DNA with Charlie Kirk’s. The irony is that the Works Progress Administration established under FDR was staging the dramatized version of It Can’t Happen Here in different venues around the country, to give unemployed actors some work. It didn’t much help revive Lewis’s dying fame. By the time Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here he still had seven novels and 15 years in him but he’d written his last major work in 1929 (Dodsworth), the year of the Great Crash, and not even trivia-seeking literature buffs could name any of those forgotten works.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive. A version of this piece aired on WNZF.
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