Conservatives spent the weekend complaining that Democrats were comparing Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden to one held by American Nazi sympathizers in 1939. And the comparison to the Nazis is somewhat overheated — there are important differences, after all, between right-wing authoritarian movements and right-wing authoritarian movements bent on genocidal conquest.
But this very real and meaningful distinction in degree between different kinds of threats to democracy is not the point Trump’s defenders wish to emphasize. And, as always happens to Trump rationalizers, their denials were quickly embarrassed when a rally speaker said, “These Latinos, they love making babies, too, just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country,” and called Puerto Rico “a floating pile of garbage.”
The speaker, a comedian, insists these insults were a joke — which is true. But given that the premise of the joke is that Latinos are subhuman and un-American, the fact that it was offered in jest is immaterial.
Trump, again, is not Hitler. But when his defenders deny that Trump is a Nazi or a fascist, they are not merely assuring us that his election won’t lead to mass-scale death factories and global war killing tens of millions of people. They are attempting to put to rest the broader and far more serious charge that Trump poses an existential risk to American democracy.
National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, in the latest edition of his series of columns rationalizing the candidate his magazine once famously attacked as unfit for office, has a........