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. 

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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."

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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 Trump campaign responded to The Atlantic article in a statement to Fox News Digital.

"More fake news by a third-rate media outlet," Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung wrote. "The fact is that Kamala Harris, Democrats, and their media enablers are the ones who are deranged by emboldening those who threaten the safety of President Trump. There have been two heinous assassination attempts on President Trump's life, and their violent rhetoric is directly to blame. Their outright lies and weaponization of the justice system to perpetuate countless witch-hunt hoaxes against President Trump have been nothing short of disgusting and abhorrent. If the Democrats and Kamala Harris do not come out and apologize for their hateful rhetoric and tone down their attacks that have stoked the flames of violence, they are explicitly advocating for and inciting more bloodshed against President Trump."

"The only people trying to take political advantage the attempted assassination are Democrats who continue to use loaded and dangerous rhetoric that have emboldened those who threaten the safety of President Trump," Cheung added. 

The Atlantic did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.