Criticize Trump, but Don’t Erase the Holocaust to Do So

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

 

American political rhetoric often abounds with ill-advised allusions to Nazi Germany. Fascism is forever descending on America, etc., etc. Donald Trump’s tenure in Oval Office has been marked by a conspicuous flowering of efforts to metaphorically couple his policies with those preferred, if not pursued, by Adolf Hitler. The last 72 hours have, however, given way to an especially toxic bloom of such analogies.

 

For example, aerial images of deportation targets temporarily housed at a Texas detention facility ahead of their hearings and removal orders led many to compare the facility to a Nazi “concentration camp.” And this sort of talk is not exclusive among the excitable activists for whom hyperbole is currency in their competition for attention. “We grew up reading the story of Anne Frank,” the impossibly irresponsible Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said over the weekend. “Somebody is gonna write one regarding Minnesota.”

 

The anxious sort are equally casual in declaring the agents of federal law enforcement an “American Gestapo.” If they’re not functionally equivalent to the brownshirts, those officers of the law are accused of subordinating their allegiance to the Constitution and acting as “a private military for Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.” When this is all over, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last advised, “We will need an American Nuremberg.”

 

This is, if not Holocaust denial, at least a minimization of the unique crimes attributable solely to the Nazi regime.

 

The concentration camps were not populated by lawful detainees awaiting their day in court. There were no judges to whom they might appeal, no defense attorneys to argue their plight, and their fate was not deportation but liquidation. The Gestapo, like all of Hitler’s agents, swore their loyalty to the man. They were exempted from the oversight of the regime’s thoroughly compromised courts, and they had a mandate to terrorize and intimidate the population. Finally, even a cursory familiarity with the crimes litigated in excruciating detail at Nuremberg should preclude any comparison between a lawfully elected American presidential administration and the Nazi regime, which (by 1934, at least, contrary to popular mythology) was an illegitimate and unconstitutional junta.

 

As I wrote earlier today, these rhetorical flourishes are designed to shock and radicalize. It is an ill-fated political project that seems so dependent on appeals to emotion and the discouragement of reason and prudence. But perhaps the time for thinking is over.