Here’s the thing about Donald Trump’s descent into Hitler

| 9:01 pm EDT June 24, 2018
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Donald Trump has been taking pages from Adolf Hitler’s playbook from day one, when he launched his campaign by trying to convince the worst of white people that their lives would magically get better if they allowed him to scapegoat Mexicans and Muslims and immigrants. As things have fallen apart for Trump, he’s clinging to Hitler’s playbook more than ever. But there’s a key detail involved here that everyone knows, yet we all tend to forget from time to time.

Here’s the thing: Hitler lost. He was able to do so much horrific and irreparable damage before he lost, we tend to forget that things ended up going very badly for him in the end. And while Hitler was enough of an ideological extremist that he may have considered the damage he did to the Jews and other groups a satisfactory trade off for his loss, Trump is simply an opportunist who uses racism as a means to an end. Trump only wins, in his mind, if he keeps power and gets to keep grifting money.

There is also another key difference here. Hitler embarked on the worst of his atrocities while his power was still on the rise, which is why he was able to get away with so much horror. Trump spent a year and a half running his mouth while largely sitting on his hands. Now that he’s in danger of being ousted for his criminal scandals, now that he’s historically unpopular, now that he’s about to lose control of the Congress, only now is he abducting immigrant kids and locking them in cages. It’s not a winning recipe for him, becuase if he ever did have the muscle to get away with this, he certainly does not now.

There is one big similarity, however, between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler: they both made the mistake in the end of overplaying their hands. Hitler ended up fighting a war on two fronts, and drawing people into the conflict whom he couldn’t defeat. Trump finds himself married to his least popular and most outrage producing position yet – children locked in cages – at a time when he has no political muscle left. Just as Hitler did, Trump is making the kinds of mistakes that’ll accelerate his ouster.