MILWAUKEE—America came within a quarter inch of a national funeral on Saturday. If assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks’ bullet had not grazed former President Donald J. Trump’s right ear but instead struck a pencil’s width nearer his skull, this week’s Republican National Convention here would be a four-day memorial, if that. Rather than working on his acceptance speech right now, Trump would by lying in state.

But with all the luck in the world, he survived. America’s toughest man, Donald J. Tungsten, stood up moments after being hit, pumped his fists defiantly, and reassured his nation that he was alive and as resilient as ever. As he now says, he is “grazed but not dazed.”

Dramatic as it was, this is a scene worth not repeating. As of this writing, it is unclear exactly why Crooks fired a rifle at Trump, killed Corey Comperatore, 57, and wounded David Dutch, 57, and James Copenhaver, 74.

Crooks was a registered Republican and a Democrat donor. Time will reveal if Crooks is indeed a first: a bipartisan assassin that neither side can weaponize against the other.

However this mystery unravels, it surely did not help matters, that Crooks—like every other American—heard the Democrat Left chant relentlessly that Trump equals Adolf Hitler. 

• The Holocaust comparisons began, even before Trump was sworn in. On Jan. 5, 2017, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told Bravo’s Andy Cohen that if she interviewed Trump, she would ask him: “Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp?”

• Trump was president for mere minutes when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews denounced his inaugural address in the most divisive terms possible. According to Matthews, Trump’s patriotic “America First” message had a “Hitlerian background to it.”

• Just a month into Trump’s presidency—before he could build a death camp, even if he had wanted to—Sunsara Taylor of Refuse Fascism suggested that Trump already had exceeded the evils of the Nazi tyrant. Taylor told Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson that Trump “could arguably be worse than Hitler.” She added: “He is more dangerous than Hitler ever could have been.”

• “I don’t understand why people are not taking him seriously,” left-wing actor Robert De Niro said about Trump on ABC News’ “The View.” Historically, De Niro said last May 14, citizens of foreign nations did not take other dictators seriously. “I think Hitler and Mussolini,” De Niro specified.

• June 2024’s cover of The New Republic featured an actual Nazi campaign poster with Hitler’s face doctored to resemble Trump. Just below, in a National Socialist typeface loomed the words “American Fascism.”

This is sick, twisted, absurd, baseless, and potentially bloody.

Anyone who has imagined piloting a time machine back to the 1920s or ’30s knows what to do if Hitler pops up:

Kill Hitler!

So, if Trump equals Hitler, it’s no shock that someone would decide that “it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye,” as President Joe Biden told donors last week. He now calls that remark “a mistake.”

Oops.

If reelected, Trump will cut taxes more than Democrats like. He will increase domestic energy more than the Left wants. He will stitch shut the southern border that they have ripped open. And he will kill race- and gender-obsession programs that Democrats caress like adult toys.

Here are a few things that Trump will not do: Throw journalists behind barbed wire. Toss Democrats into gas chambers. Cremate teachers union leaders. Invade Canada and Mexico to build a greater American Reich.

Will Donald J. Trump serve as a bold, conservative, patriotic Republican president? Yes.

Will he rule as a Nazi dictator? No.

The Left needs to abandon its venomous führer fetish or at least fiddle with it beneath the covers at night. It has no place in the public arena. Before anyone else gets shot, for God’s sake, Democrats, give it a rest! 

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