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.
Dennis C Rathsam says
Im glad your pissed off Pierre, That means TRUMP,S doind a great job! Hope you took my advise & bought stocks, a few months ago.
Laurel says
THE ESCALATOR FROM HELL! IT GOES DOWN, BUT DOESN’T GO UP! THEY ALMOST FELL FORWARD ON THE SHARP STEPS OF STEEL!
Actually, that was pretty funny.
Deborah Coffey says
To SEE and KNOW exactly where our country is at today, GOOGLE:
1. What were the goals of Nazism
2. Is Nazism the same as Fascism
AI will give you a very clear picture.
Ed P says
Is there such a thing as EWUI…editorializing while under the influence?
From the Star Wars reference to the comparison of fictional characters in a dystopian political novel brought up that possibility. Tequila or gummies? Hmm.
At least the brain aerobics staved off the possibility of Alzheimer’s for another month or two. While the book was not a quick read, it did fire a few brain neurons. Bisehtak.
Marek says
Dennis ; your support of fascism is evident..
Carol Scott says
Pierre, you are a brilliant thinker and writer and I thank you for sharing your thoughts for which I usually agree and honor. Historian Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny and On Freedom) often writes of Trump’s chaotic dystopian actions, lack of respect for the constitution, warning readers to recognize the product Trump is selling. When we see the incompetents of each individual in the Trump cabinet, it is alarming to the point of distraction, yet we are again faced with Hegseth’s featherbrained, naive idea putting generals and admirals from around the world into a single room. Snyder opines, “…puts us all at risk.” The incompetence throughout the Trump regime is unprecedented and as Pierre says of Trump, “He is no Hitler,” though I contend Trump reminds us of Hitler who first attacked the press, then universities and afterwards human empathy. Hannah Arendt put forth, “The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a future about to fall into barbarianism.”
The Jojo says
Be careful Pierre, you’re insulting the Chump and his policies! You know he would buy your mortgage and then foreclose on your house right after he went after the licensing of your internet provider and all of your sponsors…welcome to the New America. I’m waiting for the executive order to rename it The United States of Chump!
Ray W. says
This is a thought exercise.
According to a The Guardian story, over more than the past 50 years more than 30 international oil exploration companies, like Total, Shell and ExxonMobil, have searched for oil thought to be located either onshore or offshore of Pakistan. All of the companies have abandoned the effort due low rewards and due to security risks or high costs. After all this effort, Pakistani oil fields yield 65,000 barrels of oil per day, or about 20% of Pakistan’s oil needs.
Most recently, in 2019, two international oil companies spent $100 million looking for oil off the coast of Pakistan in the “Kekra-1 Indus G block”, without success. All the two companies found under the seafloor was a “waterbed.”
Despite this record of largely failed exploratory efforts, the U.S. Department of Energy produced in 2015 a survey concluding that up to 9 billion barrels of “technically recoverable oil” might exist in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s current minister of state, Ali Pervaiz Malik, recently trotted out the 2015 survey.
Why would he do so?
This past July, President Trump announced on Truth Social that “we have just concluded a Deal with the Country of Pakistan whereby Pakistan and the United States will work together on developing their massive Oil Reserves. We are in the process of choosing the Oil Company that will lead this Partnership.”
In August, President Trump gave Pakistan a 19% tariff on imported goods, “the lowest of all south Asia nations. …”
In September, the U.S. agreed to invest $500 million into efforts to develop Pakistan’s minerals sectors, which is said to include copper and rare earths, even though, according to the reporter, there are no definitive records that Pakistan contains such mineral reserves. And, also according to the reporter, it is the lack of oil in Pakistan that baffles “experts and former government officials” over Trump’s news of a massive reserve of recoverable oil.
A reporter with The Guardian spoke with Moin Raza Khan, a “geoscientist and former managing director of Pakistan Petroleum Limited, which has long been at the forefront of Pakistani oil exploration efforts. Mr. Khan said:
“What Mr. Trump is claiming about Pakistan’s massive oil reserves has nothing to do with reality. It is without the support of any data or evidence. We don’t even know where these massive reserves would be, as we don’t have any surveys and studies so far that show us.”
Mr. Khan added that thus far historically only 1.2 billion barrels of oil have been found in Pakistan, adding “… and they are claiming that they can find 100 times this in just the next three years. … It’s just impossible. There is no magic wand to multiply Pakistan’s reserves.”
After Trump’s announcement, Pakistan’s government scheduled for auction 40 new offshore and 31 onshore blocs for oil and gas exploration, with auctions to be held October 31st.
GA Sabri, Pakistan’s former director general of petroleum concession described the claim of massive oil reserves as “a political gimmick.” He told of his doubts of the success of the upcoming oil block auction. And Mr. Sabri told the reporter that even if onshore oil exploration efforts started today, it would take decades and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring the oil out of the regions to market. To say that an onshore effort to find recoverable oil would be successful, according to Mr. Sabri, would be to tell of a “myth.”
According to the reporter, what onshore oil that is believed to possibly exist in Pakistan resides in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan regions, which regions are home to insurgencies by the Taliban and other separatist movements.
Make of this what you will.
Jason says
Sinclair Lewis would be turning in his grave if he knew what FDR did to the Japanese Americans in the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack…
Oh wait, Sinclair Lewis was alive an well in 1942 and didn’t pass away until 1951. Oddly enough, he didn’t seem to have much, if anything, to say when FDR signed Executive Order 9066¹ and remained silent when the War Relocation Authority² (WRA) was established and moved roughly 120,000 Japanese Americans to the internment camps. And must have forgot how to speak or write altogether when ~1,800 of those Japanese Americans died in the internment camps.
If Sinclair Lewis wasn’t screaming from the rooftops during those events in his lifetime then he either thought it was necessary or perhaps he was just a massive hypocrite, a literary charlatan, or a coward. Either way, he isn’t the person I’d use as a beacon of Democracy when he was alive for arguably the closest the US ever actually got to fascism and did nothing of note about it.
¹ https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066
² https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/210.html
Ray W. says
Prior to his time as Supreme Court Justice, Robert Jackson served as Attorney General during the second FDR administration.
On April 1, 1940, shortly after the Hatch Act had been enacted into law, Mr. Jackson delivered a speech at the 2nd Annual Conference of United States Attorneys.
Here are excerpts from his speech, titled “The Federal Prosecutor”:
– “It would probably be within the range of that exaggeration permitted in Washington to say that assembled in this room is one of the most powerful peace-time forces known to our country. The prosecutor has more control over life, liberty, and reputation than any other person in America. His discretion is tremendous. He can have citizens investigated and, if he is that kind of person, he can have this done to the tune of public statements and veiled or unveiled intimations. Or the prosecutor may choose a more subtle course and simply have a citizen’s friends interviewed. The prosecutor can order arrests, present cases to the grand jury in secret session, and on the basis of his one-sided prosecution of the facts, can cause the citizen to be indicted and held for trial. He may dismiss the case before trial, in which case the defense never has a chance to be heard. Or he may go on with a public trial. If he obtains a conviction, the prosecutor can still make recommendations as to sentence, as to whether the prisoner should get probation or a suspended sentence, and after he is put away, as to whether he is a fit subject for parole. While the prosecutor at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst.”
– “Nothing can come out of this meeting of law enforcement officers than a rededication to the spirit of fair play and decency that should animate the federal prosecutor. Your positions are of such independence and importance that while you are being diligent, strict, and vigorous in law enforcement you can afford to be just. Although the government technically loses its case, it has really won if justice has been done. The lawyer in public office is justified in seeking to leave behind him a good record. But he must remember that his most alert and severe, but just, judges will be members of his own profession, and that lawyers rest their good opinion of each other not merely on results accomplished but on the quality of the performance. Reputation has been called ‘the shadow cast by one’s daily life.’ Any prosecutor who risks his day-to-day professional name for fair dealing to build up statistics of success has a perverted sense of practical values, as well as defects of character. Whether one seeks promotion to a judgeship, as many prosecutors rightly do, or whether he returns to private practice, he can have no better asset than to have his profession recognize that his attitude toward those who feel his power has been dispassionate, reasonable and just.”
– “The federal prosecutor has now been prohibited from engaging in political activities. I am convinced that a good-faith acceptance of the spirit and letter of that doctrine will relieve many district attorneys from the embarrassment of what have heretofore been regarded as legitimate expectations of political service. There can also be no doubt that to be closely identified with the intrigue, the money raising, and the machinery of a particular party or faction may present a prosecuting officer with embarrassing alignments and associations. I think the Hatch Act should be utilized by federal prosecutors as a protection against demands on their time and their prestige to participate in the operation of the machinery of practical politics.”
– “If the prosecutor is obliged to choose his cases, if follows that he can choose his defendants. Therein is the most dangerous power of the prosecutor: that he will pick people that he thinks he should get, rather than pick cases that need to be prosecuted. With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes, a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical violation of some sort on the part of almost anyone. In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm – in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.”
– “The qualities of a good prosecutor are as elusive and as impossible to define as those which mark a gentleman. And those who need to be told would not understand it anyway. A sensitiveness to fair play and sportsmanship is perhaps the best protection against the abuse of power, and the citizen’s safety lies in the prosecutor who tempers zeal with human kindness, who seeks truth and not victims, who serves the law and not factional purposes, and who approaches his task with humility.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
During the years when I served as a senior prosecutor, I commonly told young prosecutors that a bad or vindictive prosecutor could do more damage to society than just about any defendant could ever do.
I did not then know of Jackson’s speech on prosecution, but as the son of an elected state attorney I had been exposed to many of the ideals Jackson expressed.
So I share snippets of the speech to you.
Ray W. says
With the recent indictment of former FBI director Comey, I expect a slew of controversies to come to the fore.
Right now, one of the bigger controversies will most likely come from claims of selective or vindictive prosecution.
A former White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, appeared this morning on Face the Nation.
Asked his thoughts on the Comey prosecution, Cobb said that he didn’t think the case would ever go to trial, stating:
“You know … that the grand jury rejected one of the counts, the top count, actually in the indictment, approved two, but by a very slim margin — 14 out of 23 in a process where there’s no defense attorney in the room and the standard is merely probable cause. The next courtroom that this will be assessed in, if it gets to trial, requires unanimity from 12 people, and there will be a vigorous defense. I don’t see any way in the world that, you know, Comey will be convicted. And I think there’s a good chance, because of, you know, the wholly unconstitutional, authoritarian way that this was done, that the case may get tossed out well before trial.”
Noting that prosecutors should pursue crimes and not individuals, Cobb argued that Attorney General Bondi was going after Comey because President Trump hates him, inferring that the issue was not because a crime had been committed and that Comey had committed the crime.
Upon news of the Comey indictment, President Trump posted to Truth Social:
“He has been so bad for our Country, for so long, and is now at the beginning of being held responsible for his crimes against our Nation.”
From a university treatise on selective or vindictive prosecution, I found this language:
“Prosecutors enjoy broad discretion to choose which offenders to prosecute and which crimes to charge. On occasion this power is misused to prosecute individuals for arbitrary or discriminatory reasons or to retaliate against defendants who assert their legal rights. Responding respectively to these dangers, the prohibitions against selective and vindictive prosecution may support a motion to dismiss the charge (and where seizures have resulted, a motion to suppress). However, both federal and state courts tend to construe these doctrines narrowly, making successful defense on either ground difficult.”
KES says
Millions morn the death of Charlie Kirk. Not one car burned or shop looted. The “truth” still speaks.
Sherry says
@kes. . . so I guess violence like multiple murders by a “Mormon Hating” person at a Michigan church don’t matter? What a world!
Here we go again says
@ KES- I totally agree with you. There was no violence in regard to Charlie’s death. That speaks volumes. The man was not full of hate and he was not a bigot. He had people of different races work for him. He was loved by millions based on his teaching of love.
Here we go again says
@ Sherry- It does not appear that the shooting was related to the Charlie Kirk killing. The killer hated Mormons. So the point that People on the right did not go on a killing rampage and destroy building and cars is still accurate.
Sherry Epley says
OK Maga. . . define related. . . “I” personally think that all hostilities from Maga are related. They are connected by the ear, hate and anger spewed by trump and his supporters each and every day. As ck would say, “prove otherwise”!
Laurel says
What Kes and Here we go again don’t understand is, it’s the accumulation of many deaths of one race that goes unanswered, and unchampioned by the government. That eventually boils up, as expected. Not one death of an individual, where the President and Vice President shows up at the memorial.
That speaks volumes.
Sherry says
Right On Laurel!
With the Maga mentality there is a lack of belief in the facts regarding the rampant “Systemic Racism” in our country. Fox refuses to acknowledge that such a terrible thing exists, therefore Maga just doesn’t get it at all. I actually think that many insecure Maga members see “people of color” as inferior to them. There is a complete lack of empathy for the plight of other races. Therefore, attempts to create an equal living and playing field seem preposterous. In their insecure minds, every person of color in a position of influence/power is assumed to be nothing more than an “unqualified” DEI hire.
There is zero understanding in Maga World of the horrific “Injustices” suffered daily by the black and brown communities at the hands of the white racists in power. Therefore, Maga members double down on “blaming the victims” of that INJUSTICE if their community revolts against that “Injustice” when the George Floyd’s of this world are MURDERED by the police who represent the government, and whose job it is to “Serve and Protect”. Face it, most police only “serve and protect” white people. . . from black and brown people!
Laurel says
Sherry” Yes, many maga only see the side they want to see, and it is happily provided to them, at a great cost they do not understand. Actually, Fox Entertainment, OAN and Newmax are guilty, in my opinion, of lying by omission. It is actually shocking what they leave out, and the far fetched opinions they add in. Most networks, of both ideologies, are given statements that are repeated, often word for word, across their particular corporate networks. I don’t see that on PBS, and some of the older wire companies.
As for inferior/superior complexes, pecking orders do not only belong to chickens, but if the feathers fit…
Laurel says
Feral ” ” ” are on the loose! Often : in the wrong place as well. Must be my keyboard.
Sherry says
@ Laurel. . . Loving your line “if the feathers fit”. . . Right On Gal! LOL!