Internet's Hitler 'Law' Creator Weighs In on Trump-Biden

Donald Trump over the weekend escalated his attacks on migrants trying to cross the border, asserting that they were "poisoning the blood of our country," reports the AP. That prompted a rebuke from the campaign of President Biden, with a spokesman saying that Trump "parroted Adolf Hitler," per the Hill. All of which calls to mind an axiom of the internet known as Godwin's Law. Coined in the 1990s, it maintains that every internet argument, if it goes on for long enough, escalates to the point where one side invokes Hitler. To get a better sense of the dynamics at play here, Politico talks to the man who invented the law, Mike Godwin, now an attorney.

• Is Biden losing? Typically, the losing side plays the Hitler card, but Godwin makes clear his law doesn't stipulate that is always the case, and he says it doesn't necessarily apply here. Trump's language, he says, does indeed echo what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, and Trump has previously referred to migrants as "vermin." Trump is using the same "dehumanizing" tactic and thus is "opening himself up to the Hitler comparison," says Godwin.
• On purpose? "I think that it would be fair to say that Trump knows what he's doing," says Godwin, given the multiple examples. "I think he chose that rhetoric on purpose." In Godwin's view, Trump believes it's what his base wants to hear. "He finds it both rewarding personally for himself and he believes it's necessary to motivate people to help him get elected again."
• Not so much: Two prominent Republicans shrugged off the Hitler comparisons. "We're talking about language? I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, referring to legislation to stem the flow at the border. And "I think it's highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read Mein Kampf," said Marc Short, former chief of staff to Mike Pence, per Mediaite. Of Trump, he added: "He says something out loud and outlandish, and they attack what he said rhetorically, but you come back to the root of the issue, and it's where a lot of the American people agree with him." (That echoes a somewhat famous 2016 observation of Trump made by writer Saleno Zito in the Atlantic—"the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.")
• A critic: In a Washington Post analysis, Philip Bump writes that the Hitler comparisons are beside the point. "The issue, instead, is that Trump's language shows how much and how far hostility to immigration has evolved and grown in the United States—thanks largely to Trump himself." Bump lays out his case in the essay. Trump is "again reflecting the verbiage of the fringe, but that verbiage has shifted well to the right over the past eight years."

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