In my lifetime, there have been a lot of people compared to Hitler - especially presidents: currently Trump, but before him Obama, and before him Bush (who was often called "bushitler"), and before them many others.
It's so prevalent that Godwin's law was created: "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1".
But none of these Hitler comparisons resonate with me. That's because for Hitler, specific attributes, actions and characteristics subjectively stand out to me in sort of a personal Rorschach test where instead of looking at an inkblot I picture or think about Hitler. The very first thing I think of when I think of Hitler is that he put millions of Jews (and others) in concentration camps in terrible conditions then horrifically killed the vast majority of them. Note the past tense of that last statement. It's not that Hitler might or would have done that in the future, but rather he actually did do that. To me, that's the number one unique characteristic of Hitler that pops into my mind when I think about him.
But if I ignore that, my next Rorschach response is that he was a major instigator of the biggest global conflict ever (WWII) that claimed many tens of millions of lives. Again, note the past tense.
If I ignore both the genocide and the world war, then other more trivial things jump out at me; perhaps things that were enablers of some of his terrible actions. For example, I believe that he was fairly intelligent, extremely well read, a persuasive orator, and charismatic. Lastly, during my Hitler Rorschach test, for some reason I generally remember that he was a vegetarian for part of his life.
After that, my Hitler Rorschach test yields very little response. That's not to say that objectively Hitler didn't have many other attributes, actions and characteristics that defined him. I'm just saying that when Hitler pops up in my mind (pretty much universally because someone else brought him up), subjectively, those handful of things are what I think of.
So when I hear "X is Hitler" it just doesn't resonate or convince me because subjectively, to me, if X hasn't actually killed millions in a concentration camp based genocide and started a world war, then X is simply much different than Hitler in my mind.
A variant is "X is as bad as Hitler." For example, "Trump is as bad as Hitler because ICE puts foreign children in cages." This is also subjective, but to me, no U.S. president or politician has come close to being as bad as Hitler. It's bad that foreign children are separated from their parents and detained (put in cages), but there are orders of magnitude fewer children and many orders of magnitude fewer children are killed (and none intentionally) relative to Jewish children in Hitler's Germany. The size of the atrocity makes a difference to me. Sure, one child dying is really bad, but 1,000,000 children dying is a lot worse to me.
As I mentioned above, the tense of the verb matters (subjectively) to me. Thus, "X might/will become as bad as Hitler" just doesn't work for me at least partly because even Hitler wouldn't have become as bad as Hitler except in the very specific set of circumstances that he lived (childhood, WWI, Treaty of Versailles, external influences, economic depression, etc.). A variant of this is "X is on the same path as Hitler." That's more possible but none of our Presidents nor politicians have been on a path anything like Hitler's in my opinion. For example, none of them have written a screed like Mein Kampf which foretold Hitler's ambition and genocidal nature.
I also question to what extent "X is like Hitler" or one of the many variants I listed above more so than "X is like Y" where Y is some other tyrant such as Franco, Stalin, Pinochet, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander the Great, etc. Why is X more like Hitler than any of these others? There are thousands of tyrants to choose from.
I'm always wondering why Hitler?
