Never Again...Again

Nazi Germany has long been regarded as an ultimate, unspeakable evil, with no possible comparisons or parallels here. Not any longer.

ELECTION DAY AT MAR-A-Lago. Felonious 45/47 gathers with MAGA faithful as America awaits its fate. Present, a delegation of far-right Germans. Forty-five/Forty-seven strolls onto a veranda in a saggy blue suit, white shirt sans tie, and his devil-red logo cap. "So, where's my German friends?" he says and beckons a group of five white dudes, including Alternative für Deutschland party candidate Phillipp-Anders Rau and Fabrice Ambrosini, who resigned as the youth leader of the Christian Democratic Union over allegations he flashed the Nazi salute. The Germans parrot the "Fight! Fight! Fight!" that 45/47 chanted after a would-be assassin's bullet grazed his ear in July.

He thanks his fawning guests and they give a thumbs-up sign for a group photo.

This from a man whose first wife, according to Vanity Fair in 1990, revealed that he kept a book of Hitler's speeches at his bedside (a claim he didn't deny), who equivocated for neo-Nazis marching through Charlottesville, who was accused by his longest-serving chief of staff of having said Hitler "did some good things."

It is common to describe the Third Reich as the nefandum-the unspeakable evil-to avoid mentioning the Nazis' mass malevolence alongside anything else. But what of the paradox that Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Italy, and Finland of the EU have swung to hard-right governance, that for those intent on dismantling a liberal democracy, Nazi Germany is an exemplar?

What of Hitler praising America's westward Native-annihilating expansion? Of the Jim Crow South and American eugenics inspiring the Reich's Nuremberg Laws? While wholesale comparisons between the United States and Nazi Germany have often been dismissed as hasty and/or hyperbolic, rather comparing MAGA to the Third Reich ain't overblown or premature or alarmist-it is stock that beseeches: Just how close to them are we, really?