Republished with permission from Steve Schmidt

I am a Bill Maher fan, and won’t take a back seat to anyone on that point, but I must push back on Mr. Maher’s declaration about Trump:

I’m just reporting exactly what I saw over two and a half hours. I went into the mine, and that’s what’s down there. A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is (expletive) up. It’s just not as (expletive) up as I thought it was. And I have no illusions now that I’m back to work at my job that he might start a new list…

…Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was—I swear to God—absent, at least on this night with this guy.

Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know. And I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw, and I wasn’t high.

I thought that Larry David’s editorial in The New York Times was frivolous and empty. If Mr. David was looking for a collaborating fascist for a proverbial-head shaving then he might have considered aiming his clippers in the direction of his TV (ex-)wife of 24 seasons.

What I find most troubling about Bill Maher is his recent ambition to police the debate around what Trump is and is not. Whether he realizes it or not, he is assuming the posture of the “woke left crazies” of the Democratic Party whom he disdains.

Bill Maher doesn’t understand the lessons of the Third Reich. The usually razor-sharp Maher sounds like he’s auditioning for a spot on Fox News next to Brian Kilmeade when he says in reaction to David’s editorial:

To use the Hitler thing— first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews. That should kind of be in its own place.

The minute you play the ‘Hitler’ card, you’ve lost the argument. Nobody’s been more prescient about Donald Trump than me. Just the fact that I met him doesn’t change that. I went back to my day job of tearing him a new asshole!

I’ve been more prescient, and no one has led any organization ever that did more damage to the MAGA cause than the one I led during the 2020 campaign that tragically was destroyed by the greed, incompetence, dishonesty and misconduct of Reed Galen and John Weaver.

On Friday’s edition of “Real Time,” Maher said the following to Vice President Al Gore when he invoked Hitler’s Third Reich in a keynote speech earlier this week:

I just think ‘Nazi’ is a hard word to use with nuance. So, when you bring that word out—I feel like they’re the goat of evil, and so it just conflates your [argument].

I guarantee that the side of the country that voted for Trump, they hear ‘Nazi,’ and they just go, ‘Oh, you’re calling us Nazis?’ First of all, it’s a bit of a false premise, as bad as they are. And also, it just says to them, ‘Well, you just hate us.’ And one thing I’ve learned in recent years, the one thing that’s more powerful than money is hate.

When people hate you so much, and they think you hate them so much, even the money goes out the window. Not that I think Trump is going to survive if he takes the economy down. But this idea that—well, I’ll just take a random example—you can’t even break bread with them, ‘we hate you so much, you’re a deplorable and you’re not worth having dinner with.’

Elie Wiesel saw it differently.

We have an obligation to remember.

The unique evil of the Nazi Reich should never be trivialized, but the truth is that the trivialization comes, not by appropriately comparing Trump’s gathering evil like Vice President Al Gore just did—which Maher rebuked—but rather Maher’s demand that all the rest of us treat Hitler like Voldemort.

Apparently, so long as the name is not said out loud, there is nothing to worry about.

Seeing the nature of things is essential in this moment.

Bill Maher knows many things, but he does not know all things. His knowledge in this particular area seems to be broadly deficient as he orients the lessons of the Nazis around their body count.

Here is the Book of Names from Auschwitz:

Here is what Bill Maher doesn’t get or understand about the difference between MAGA and national socialism at the most fundamental level.

Everybody knows how the Third Reich ended, and everybody knows the last crimes the Nazis committed.

The world knows Hitler blew his brains out on April 30, 1945, after poisoning his dog to test out the cyanide he passed to Eva Braun.

The world knows that Josef Goebbels and his evil wife Magda poisoned their six children in the same bunker before killing themselves.

The world knows what happened at the Nuremberg trials, and at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961—even if they are less familiar with the lessons learned from the Israeli police captain who interrogated Eichmann for 275 hours, and spoke about it 20 years later.

Avner Less said there are Adolf Eichmanns everywhere. He said they are all around us, but harmless and latent in a democracy. Less said the danger comes if democracy falls. He said it didn’t matter if it was a dictatorship of the left or right. What he pointed out was that the “latent Eichmanns” turn deadly in an instant when dictatorships rise.

The world has no idea what MAGA will do next and next and next.

This is why the lessons of the Third Reich matter.

When Winston Churchill wrote his six-volume memoir of the Second World War he did not give Hitler Maher’s Voldemort treatment.

Churchill called him a “diabolical genius,” and made the point that the greatest disaster in the history of the world was unnecessary and caused by delusion, miscalculations and the same denialism swirling today.

It should also be noted that Churchill, who saved the world, very badly wanted to have dinner with Adolf Hitler during a visit to 1930s Germany, and had been told that Hitler would be coming. When he didn’t show up Churchill told his German hosts that it was a pity that the Führer had missed a chance to dine with Winston Churchill. (This offers more proof that, in all the world, even amongst the greatest of men, there is no flower more delicate than the male ego.)

Three years ago, Trump’s Hungarian idol gave a speech shortly before hosting a CPAC event that was 100 per cent a Nazi speech.

I wrote about it at the time. There can be no debate around the nature of the speech. It is a Nazi speech delivered in the 21st century. This should matter if for no other reason than this simple human reality: each century of human history has been deadlier than the last. The war started by the Nazis killed 80 million people around the world. Because the world survived the horror the leaders of free nations understood for 80 years, until right now, that when peace slips away what comes next exceeds the imaginations of possibility. This is the precise lesson that matters from 1930s Germany.

Before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime of criminals lit the world on fire they took power by eradicating truth and morality. They called it “greatness.”

Bill Maher would do well to walk into the mountain in Bavaria where bored in to the rock was a passage to a golden elevator. It carried an Austrian Prime Minister through the rock to the top, where Adolf Hitler conducted a shakedown almost identical to the disgrace that took place in the Oval Office between Trump and Zelensky. Identical.

Bill Maher should read this piece by Timothy Snyder that explains the similarities and the manifest anti-semitism.

I’m going to share something evil with you that must be read slowly and precisely.

Think about it deeply.

Think about what it means, and what must be confronted—or not.

Do not look away from it.

Ignorance is not safety. It is surrender, and sometimes, death.

What I’m going to share is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Joseph Goebbels, titled “The Storm is Coming,” in July of 1932.

It was a few weeks before the last German elections, which wouldn’t occur for another 17 years.

I have changed a total of 57 words/numbers (in bolded caps) from the speech below.

Twenty-two of them are changes of Germany to AMERICA.

Eight changes involve dates/numbers.

My request is that you evaluate the speech below rigorously, and see if it sounds fascist to you.

Does MAGA fit, or am I asking you to place a round peg in a square hole?

You should decide for yourself, but whatever prescience Bill Maher has had about Trump is at the water’s edge without a boat if he can’t see what is gathering just over the horizon—by noticing the sky is an unusual shade.

The men of November [1918] 2020 took power by lying to the people, by telling them they had won. They promised you, workers, citizens and creative Germans, AMERICANS a Reich COUNTRY of freedom and beauty and dignity.

They promised you socialism OPPORTUNITY, they promised a people’s state, they promised the broad masses the fulfillment of their dreams—peace, work and prosperity.

We have lived this lie for 14 4 years, we have worshipped this government; we have lived in want, suffered, sacrificed, starved, sometimes wept.

And now we see the worst results of these 14 4 years: the German AMERICAN economy is in ruins, there are huge budget deficits, the nation’s fortune is squandered, people are robbed of their inheritance, people are desperate and without hope, the streets of our big cities are filled with an army of millions of unemployed, the middle class is vanishing, the farmers driven from their land. To our shame and disgrace large areas of German AMERICAN territory have been lost.

Our territory is divided by the bleeding wound of the Polish corridor SOUTHERN BORDER and Germany AMERICA is drained by a stupid and unnatural tribute payments.

It is not hard to determine who is guilty, who bears the responsibility, to the people, to history and to God for these conditions.

It is those men and the parties CROOKED HILLARY AND CROOKED JOE who have misled the German AMERICAN people for 14 12 years, promising them lives of beauty and dignity, of heaven on earth, but who in the end gave us empty words and stones instead of bread.

They stand now before the court of the nation to give an account of the unparalleled disaster they have brought about in the last 14 12 years.

Five weeks ago TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-SEVEN DAYS AGO the last cabinet ADMINISTRATION of this system fell.

New men came on the political stage and declared that they had the goal of replacing the November System A RIGGED SYSTEM and setting Germany AMERICA on a fundamentally new political course.

You men and women know that we viewed this attempt with suspicion from the beginning. We see the resurrection of our people as coming not from a small clique that has no strong connection to the people; only a movement of millions has the active strength and the ability to change Germany AMERICA…

You, men, women and comrades, are the bearers, witnesses, builders and finishers of this unique people’s uprising.

Our policies have not been popular. We have served the truth, and only the truth. For twelve years, they have insulted and outlawed and slandered and persecuted us. Now that we are standing at the doorway to power, Marxist WOKE lies have joined with bourgeois weakness to fight us. Were we only a party like all the rest, we would collapse under the offensive of our opponents.

But we are a people’s movement. That is our good fortune. Here and everywhere else in the land, the red shining Swastika MAGA flag flies over people of all camps, parties, classes, occupations, and religious confessions. Our opponents laughed at us in the past, but they laugh no longer.

You men and women standing before me, a hundred or two hundred thousand in number, with heads high, upright, proud and brave, the carriers of Germany’s AMERICA’S future, in your eyes it is written:

We think no longer in terms of class. We are not workers or middle class. We are not first of all Protestants or Catholics. We do not ask about ancestry or class.

Together we share the words of the poet:

“People, rise up, and storm, break loose!”

Comrades, men and women, fate has given us a last chance. We have one more opportunity to speak to the people. Our campaign spreads to all of Germany AMERICA, and once again the ears hear, the eyes see, the heart beats faster and the senses clear:

“The day of freedom and prosperity is coming!”

So our dead comrade Horst Wessel ASHLI BABBITT wrote, and we are fulfilling his HER prophesy.

The others may lie, slander, and pour their scorn on us—their political days are numbered.

Adolf Hitler DONALD TRUMP is knocking at the gates of power, and in his fist are joined the fists of millions of workers and farmers. The time of shame and disgrace is nearly over.

You are the witnesses, the builders, the will-bearers of our idea and our worldview.

The party hacks of the Socialist DEMOCRAT Party are suddenly remembering the people.

For a decade, the illustrated magazines pictured them only in frock coats and cylinder hats at tables filled with oysters and champagne bottles. Now they wear workers’ caps and fill their newspapers with urgings like “People, wake up!”

Well, we the people have awakened! We have risen against oppression, 15 million people have joined in an army of revenge.

Our answer:

“The good old days of party bigwigs are over. A new Germany AMERICA is coming, an Germany AMERICA raised on the Spartan laws of Prussian CHRISTIAN duty.

It is a Germany AMERICA not grown fat, but one that is starving! It is a Germany AMERICA with strength, with will, with idealism!

It is a Germany AMERICA that is done with Marxist WOKE betrayal and bourgeois white gloves.”

And you are the witnesses of this Germany AMERICA. You, people, have affirmed this Germany AMERICA. And we, people, speak in your name. We the leaders of this exciting movement of the millions, we come from you, the people. We too, comrades, were once unknown men marching with the gray masses.

People, we have shared in our hearts your torture, your misery, your tribulations, your desperation. We are a piece of the people. When the bourgeois ELITE know-it-alls ask what we have accomplished, you, men and women, must save us from the necessity of giving answer. When they ask what we have done, you 15 million must answer: “They have given us faith once more, they have given us hope. They have awakened a sleeping Germany AMERICA.

They have organized and mobilized millions and set them to march. These millions are in motion, following the laws of history. Just as this small sect grew from seven unknown men to a movement of 15 77.3 million so, too, I swear to you, will this movement of 15 77.3 million grow to encompass a people of 65 344 million.

The parties must go! The political hacks must be thrown out of their chairs. We will give no pardon. We will not allow Germany AMERICA to sink into disgrace. We will give back to Germany AMERICA a reason for its existence, a meaning to life. That is why you men and women are here, an army of two hundred thousand. Never has the Reich MAGA capital seen a popular movement of such force. You have come here from everywhere. The middle class has come from the west, the workers from the east and north. You have come from dark and joyless apartment houses. My S. A. PROUD BOY comrades are before me, heads high, as if they were the kings of Germany AMERICA.

I know, comrades, that there are some among you who do not know where tomorrow’s meal will come from. We have shown these materialist party hacks that idealism is alive in Germany AMERICA.

We have shown them that even in the midst of hunger, sacrifice, and need, the people can be shown the way to betterment. We pledge loyalty to this people. We solemnly raise our hands and pledge:

As long as we breathe, we are obligated to the German AMERICAN people.

We came from the people, and return ever to it. The people is the center of all things to us. We sacrifice for this people, and if necessary are ready to die for it.

Loyalty to the people, loyalty to the idea, loyalty to the movement, and loyalty to the Führer LEADER! That is our pledge as we shout:

Our Führer LEADER and our party—Hail victory!