No matter how familiar we become with the defamatory hyperbole of the Trump-haters, some of their utterances are disquieting. Few people are still startled by some of the attempted incitements to violence against the president and his followers of some of the racist African-American and Islamist Democratic members of the Congress, although their conduct and their utterances are disgraceful and shame the institution to which electors have mistakenly elevated them.

No one, though, could seriously be prepared for the governor of Illinois, the personification of inherited wealth, J.B. Pritzker, to make the portentous announcement to a national television audience that because of his association with the Illinois Holocaust Museum, he is an authority on the career and methods of Adolf Hitler and is perfectly qualified to attest to the similarity of the methods and ambitions of President Trump.

In the unlikely event that Mr. Pritzker does know anything about the Nazi era in German and European history, that makes his claim of a comparison between Hitler and Mr. Trump even more inexcusable than the usual flippant and ignorant references to Hitler as if he were merely an unusually nasty political leader.

For years, in their desperation and their ignorance, senior Democratic spokespersons have trivialized the monstrous crimes of Hitler and the fate of his many millions of innocent victims by reaching well into the consciousness of millions of Americans and bandying about the name of the man who was personally responsible for perhaps 50 million people who died in World War II, including more than 12 million who perished in conditions of unimaginable barbarity in the Nazi death camps.

Secretary Hillary Clinton played at it with an absurd comparison between Trump supporters raising their right hands with outstretched index fingers like sports fans proclaiming their team to be number one, and masses of Nazis giving the straight right arm “Sieg heil” salute to the Führer.

The former House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who is long a champion of mind-bending exaggeration and who said that the Trump tax cuts of 2018 were “the worst disaster in the history of the world” and that President Biden was so distinguished a president that he “belonged on Mount Rushmore.” That was shortly before she helped sack him as the nominated presidential candidate of her party for rank incompetence). She has frequently compared Mr. Trump to Hitler.

The principal problem raised by these comparisons of a freely reelected American president with one of the most monstrously wicked people in all of history is that it indicates a dangerous ignorance of vital aspects of Western history. All of the Democratic politicians that I’ve mentioned are too well-informed not to know how false and slanderous these claims are. 

Yet they are obviously comfortable in the certainty that the great majority of the American public really has no idea of the extent of Hitler’s evildoing. The greatest utility of history as a subject is to give contemporary societies an insight into conduct and beliefs that are apt to be creditable and successful and those that are likely to be failures and sometimes shameful failures.

If the American public actually believes that any comparison between Hitler and Mr. Trump has the slightest applicability, that is convincing evidence of a dangerous level of ignorance of history in the United States. It was George Santayana who said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

If contemporary Americans have no clear idea of who Hitler was and attach any credence at all to the notion that Mr. Trump resembles Hitler in any way other than that they are both masculine humans, then America is in much greater danger of being distracted and even misled by an authentic disciple of Hitler then it would if Americans were properly educated on the true proportions of Nazi evil and the proud role that America played with other nations in the defeat and destruction of Hitler.

It is similarly true that when atheism and anti-theism triumph completely in a society, and there is an oppressive and militant consensus that there are no spiritual forces, no divine intelligence, we are opening the way to the pagan elevation of men as presumptive deities. If there is nothing beyond what is perceptible and that every day we proceed toward a plenitude of knowledge, that susceptibility in the human psyche which has always been curious about spiritual forces and divine inspiration, is left to be impressed and ultimately transported by demonic heathenism as manifested in the Nuremberg rallies of Hitler and the May Day parades of Stalin.

The leader of France’s revolutionary Reign of Terror, Robespierre, produced a comparatively innocuous proto-festivity with his Festival of the Supreme Being on what is now the site of the Eiffel Tower. Genuinely great men who did not discourage their practical elevation to the status of demigods, such as Alexander the Great and Julius and Augustus Caesar, were talented and generally benign rulers but they incited a great deal of incompetent and often destructive imitation, including Caligula and Nero.

This is yet another area where the American teachers’ unions have allowed educational standards to collapse and created such a vacuum in the mind of the American populace that a controversial but constitutional president can be compared to the unspeakable murderer of scores of millions of innocents with apparent credulity. When the governor of Illinois, an educated man and former head of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, swaddles himself in his familiarity with the Holocaust and makes this comparison, he utters an evil calumny, shames himself and tarnishes the “Land of Lincoln.”