The Poseurs Who Think They're the Heroes Opposing Today's Hitler

Tim Graham on Apr 23, 2025

Is there any political schtick more tedious now than comparing President Donald Trump to Hitler? Politico posted an article noting Al Gore did this at a Climate Week event in San Francisco, and RealClearPolitics co-founder Tom Bevan tweeted with a smirk, "Gore says the same thing Democrats have been saying for a decade."

The Democrats campaigned heavily in 2024 claiming Trump represented an end to democracy, and they lost the election. But it hasn't slowed them down in the slightest.

The "independent fact-checkers" who act as a publicity arm of the Democrats never "fact-check" anyone calling Trump a "fascist" or comparing him to Hitler or Mussolini or Pol Pot or "insert mass-murdering dictator here." PolitiFact screeches "Pants on Fire" when a Republican calls a Democrat a "socialist," but "fascist" is always fair for categorizing conservatives.

Bill Maher's recent dinner with Trump spurred angst-riddled articles on the Left. In The Washington Post, Mexican journalist Leon Krauze compared Maher's dinner with Trump to journalists and politicians who were charmed in private meetings by Castro, Stalin and Mao. He wrote of New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews being in thrall to Castro.

So it was extra-special when The New York Times published an op-ed by Larry David, who loves making a friendly impression of socialist Bernie Sanders on "Saturday Night Live." The title was "My Dinner with Adolf," making an incredibly unfunny mockery of Maher meeting with Trump.

In his satire, this poseur imagined he saw Hitler laugh: "Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I'd seen and heard -- the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning."

Oh, Larry is dizzy, all right. Face-plant dizzy.

What was actually funny was Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy explaining why they accepted this drivel: "Times Opinion has a high bar for satire -- our mission is geared toward idea-driven, fact-based arguments -- and we have a really, really high bar for commenting on today's world by invoking Hitler."

So a president who's been a great friend of Israel and who's currently withholding federal money for universities with a nasty antisemitism problem is somehow today's Hitler?

Healy acknowledged "callbacks to history can be offensive, imprecise or in terrible taste when you are leveraging genocidal dictators to make a point." But he claimed "Larry's piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that."

Fact check: False. Larry is clearly and imprecisely equating Trump with Hitler, just like almost everyone else on the Left.

In a 2020 interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Larry sang the same bitter notes about Trump: "The man has not one redeeming quality. You could take some of the worst dictators in history and I'm sure that all of them, you could find one decent quality. Stalin could have had one decent quality, we don't know!"

Many leftists scold each other for "humanizing" Trump, when apparently the proper thing to do is perennially dehumanize him. They can't "normalize" Trump by admitting he might have one redeeming quality. They have more hope that mass-murdering Stalin was more redeemable. Then they assert they are the sanest ones, the ones not divorced from reality.

=========

Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org. To find out more about Tim Graham and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.