Atlantic article comparing Trump to ‘Hitler, Stalin’ sparks criticism online from journalists, pundits

Journalists and political commentators responded on social media to an article from The Atlantic comparing former President Trump to multiple fascist dictators, including Adolf Hitler. 

The Atlantic article, headlined, “Trump Is Speaking Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini” was published Friday. “The former president has brought dehumanizing language into American presidential politics,” Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum argued. 

“When you spend 8 years calling a person every bad name you can think of — including Hitler — only to see that it’s not working, so you desperately decide the only thing left for you to do is call him all the bad names at once,” independent journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote on X in response to the harsh headline. 

DEM STRATEGISTS RATCHET UP HITLER-TRUMP COMPARISONS DESPITE CONCERNS ABOUT HEATED RHETORIC

RealClearPolitics co-founder and president Tom Bevan mocked the over-the-top nature of the headline, saying, “The Atlantic with a threefer.”

Margot Cleveland, senior legal correspondent for The Federalist, responded, “When Hitler isn’t bad enough!”

National editor for the Atlantic, Scott Stossel, praised Applebaum for her article about Trump’s rhetoric. My colleague [Applebaum] knows as much about the history of authoritarian regimes as anyone. When she says that Trump has begun using the language of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini with clear intentionality, pay attention.”

MSNBC GUEST COMPARES TRUMP TO HITLER’S FINAL DAYS IN BUNKER OVER HIS HARRIS AI CROWD CLAIMS

Applebaum called Trump’s political rhetoric “ugly and repellent” in her article. 

“These words belong to a particular tradition. Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often,” Applebaum. “In 1938, he praised his compatriots who had helped “cleanse Germany of all those parasites who drank at the well of the despair of the Fatherland and the People,'” she continued. 

“In occupied Warsaw, a 1941 poster displayed a drawing of a louse with a caricature of a Jewish face. The slogan: ‘Jews are lice: they cause typhus.’ Germans, by contrast, were clean, pure, healthy, and vermin-free. Hitler once described the Nazi flag as ‘the victorious sign of freedom and the purity of our blood,’” Applebaum wrote. 

The Atlantic and the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.