Biden compares Trump to Hitler as he runs against tide of authoritarianism in a new age of strongmen

Biden campaign appears to want voters to believe that they must re-elect the president or witness the rise of fascism in America, Gustaf Kilander writes

The Biden campaign has been pushing hard to remind voters why they ousted Trump in 2020 (Getty Images)

The Biden campaign has taken to comparing former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and the president himself has also stepped into the fray.

In the last month and a half, as Mr Trump’s rhetoric has grown more extreme, calling his political opponents “vermin” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the Biden campaign has issued statements comparing Mr Trump to the Nazi leader at least four times. 

It’s a continuation of Mr Biden’s 2020 campaign, when he was running to “restore the soul of America” and the US as the global leader of the liberal international world order amid a steady rise of authoritarianism throughout the 2010s.

A new age of strongmen

Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, the recently ousted Law and Justice Party in Poland, ex-President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and most importantly Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, are all examples of leaders who have based their leadership on the idea that we are in a new age of strongmen.

Many of them Mr Biden will have known personally from his time as vice president and senator atop the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Biden has made clear that the cataclysm that led to his decision to run in 2020 was the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 after which Mr Trump said there were “very fine” people on both sides – both among the counter-protesters and among the violent white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us”.

Biden’s focus on the fate of global democracy

Mr Biden’s focus on the fate of global democracy was clear after he entered the White House as he hosted a “Summit for Democracy” within a year of becoming president "to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad".

But the threats Mr Biden saw in 2020 haven’t gone away. If anything, they have worsened. Mr Putin is more confident than ever that he can outlast the Western world after the less-than-stellar start of his invasion of Ukraine, and Mr Xi recently became the first Chinese leader to begin a third term atop the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao.

At home, Mr Trump is going further than ever, bringing his admiration for dictators and strongmen into public view, using the criticism of left-of-centre leaders to whip up his base and attempting to paint himself as borderline messianic, saying again and again that he’s being targeted because he’s standing up for the ordinary American.

Mr Biden has even said that he’s unsure he would run again if he wasn’t facing Mr Trump, whose GOP nomination is seen by most observers as a foregone conclusion.

After the Colorado Supreme Court booted Mr Trump from the state’s ballot this week for his part in the Capitol riot, Mr Biden was asked on Wednesday if Mr Trump is an insurrectionist.

"It’s self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero,” Mr Biden said.

‘Don’t compare me to the Almighty’

The White House and Mr Biden appear to be using the image of Hitler, the most reviled figure in modern history, to go on the offensive against the former president in an effort to remind voters and the coalition that brought him to power in 2020 of why they ousted Mr Trump in the first place.

The president likes to quote his dad when criticising his predecessor: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Mr Biden is telling voters that even if they don’t like him, take a good look at who he’s up against. The Biden campaign appears to want voters to believe that they must re-elect the president, or witness the rise of fascism in America.

‘Echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany’

At a fundraiser in San Franciso in November, Mr Biden slammed Mr Trump’s comments in New Hampshire, where he said he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be against Donald Trump, but damn he shouldn’t be president,” Mr Biden said.

“In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the ‘vermin’, quote, ‘the vermin in America’ – a specific phrase with a specific meaning,” Mr Biden said.

“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s,” Mr Biden said. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, quote, ‘the blood of America is being poisoned’ – ‘the blood of America is being poisoned.’ Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement at the time that “on a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting”.

Compared Trump and GOP senators to Nazi propagandist

Mr Biden compared Mr Trump to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in September 2020. Shortly before he would go on to beat him in the election that November, Mr Biden told MSNBC that Mr Trump was "sort of like Goebbels”.

"You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge," Mr Biden said, reacting to Mr Trump trying to make his opponent out to be a socialist.

“I think people see very clearly the difference between me and Donald Trump,” Mr Biden said. “Trump is clearing protests in front of the White House that are peaceful with the military. This guy is more Castro than Churchill.”

Mr Biden also compared Texas Senator Ted Cruz to Goebbels after the 2020 election after the senator pushed Mr Trump’s lies about the election being stolen.

The then-president-elect remembered Goebbels’ exaggeration of civilian deaths during the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, which ran in newspapers across the globe. Goebbels argued that the bigger the lie and the more it was repeated, the likelier it was that it would come to be believed.

Mr Biden noted that both Mr Cruz and Mr Trump pushed the notion that there was something wrong with the election in the face of a complete lack of evidence to back up their claims.

“They’re part of the big lie,” Mr Biden said at the time. “When we were told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie … when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed. [Or] was it 2,500 people that were killed? And Goebbels said no, 25,000, or 250,000 were killed. And our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s a big lie.”

Around 25,000 civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden in early 1945, months before the surrender of Nazi Germany. Goebbels, known for his lies, claimed that 200,000 died.

Mr Biden was asked if Mr Cruz or Missouri Sen Josh Hawley, who also took part in the delaying of the certification of the results, should resign, Mr Biden said: “They should be just flat beaten the next time they run.”

Mr Biden said at the time that if Mr Trump was “the only one saying it, that’s one thing. But the acolytes that follow him, like Cruz and others, they’re as responsible as he is”.

“There are decent people out there who actually believe these lies because they’ve heard it again and again.”

“The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are,” he told the press at the time. “They’re part of the big lie. The big lie.”

The neo-Nazi rally that inspired Biden to run

Mr Biden has said that his outrage at the neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, after which Mr Trump, as president, said there were “very fine people on both sides” even after the death of a counter-protester, was the moment he decided to run.

At a fundraiser in 2019 after his campaign launch, Mr Biden said, "When those folks came out of the fields carrying those torches, chanting the anti-Semitic bile and their veins bulging, accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan, with such ugliness … I never thought I’d see something like that again in my life. That’s when I decided”.

In his 2019 campaign announcement video, Mr Biden said about Mr Trump’s response to the event: “In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”