U.S. politics seems more divided than ever before, and one comparison might just make the point more than anything else.
For example: To compare U.S. President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and the MAGA movement to Nazis, is an inexact and unfair analogy.
Nonetheless, it has appeared repeatedly.
And while there’s something of a taboo against that in American discourse — on the early Internet, it was called “Godwin’s Law” — it hasn’t stopped many people from going ahead and making it, over the years.
Donald Trump and Hitler: Why the Comparison?
But there’s one particular aspect of the Nazi rise that has come up on a few occasions, over the years, including this week in one of the nation’s leading Jewish media outlets. And that is the Dolchstosslegende, or the “stabbed-in-the-back myth.”
What is Dolchstosslegende?
The German phrase translates directly to “dagger-stab legend,” although it’s more often translated as “stab-in-the-back.”
The idea dates back more than a century, to the immediate aftermath of Germany’s defeat in World War I. According to the website of The Anne Frank House, it began as something of a conspiracy theory following the First World War: That the Germans lost the war not because their army was defeated, but because they had been undermined on the home front by various people, implicitly Jews, Marxists and others.
Some top German generals, naturally, were among the leading proponents of the theory. It was also core to the rise of Adolf Hitler, and picked up by much of the German public, and helping to set the stage for the rise of the Nazi reich.
Trump’s Dolchstosslegende
In an op-ed published this week in the Forward, a major newspaper for the Jewish community, author Terrence Petty points out some similarities between that theory and some propagated by Trump during the early days of his second presidency.
Petty is a journalist who has authored a pair of books about the Nazi and post-Nazi era, Nazis At The Watercooler: War Criminals In Postwar German Government Agencies and Enemy Of The People: The Munich Post and the Journalists Who Opposed Hitler. The piece is illustrated with a picture of a protester holding up a sign with a drawing of Trump with a Hitler-like mustache drawn on.
“Donald Trump has created an American version of the Dolchstosslegende, propagating a myth that the nation is being led to ruination,” Petty writes, naming such Trump “enemies” as former President Biden, prosecutors and judges who have gone against him in legal cases, universities, the media, and others.
“All of this is utter nonsense, of course, but this American stabbed-in-the-back lie is at the core of Trump’s assaults on democracy,” he writes.
Petty also points to a line from Trump’s second inaugural address — “for many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair” — as similar to the German tradition of Dolchstosslegende, along with other actions taken by Trump so far, including the purging of books, including some about the Holocaust, as part of the Administration’s push against DEI.
Past Examples
This is far from the first time a writer has compared Trump’s actions to the Dolchstosslegende tendency.
The analogy was raised by a Slate op-ed in 2019, arguing against Trump’s first impeachment, on the grounds that it would help him push his own Dolchstosslegende myth.
It was also raised numerous times, including by op-ed writers from both the New York Times and the Washington Post, during Trump’s attempts to contest his defeat in the 2020 election.
“His efforts to deny the reality of defeat and threaten democracy recall the most famous comparable episode in modern European history — the claims by the German military and diplomatic establishment that Germany had not been defeated militarily in World War I,” Jeffrey Herf wrote in the Post at the time.
Does this mean Trump is himself another Hitler? Not exactly. There are many key differences. But Trump is keeping with the dangerous tendency of despots throughout history to blame all of their problems on shadowy cabals of enemies.
About the Author: Stephen Silver
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter
