But here I want to zero in on something Prager said back in May when he first threw his weight behind Trump. Let me assure you that I am not making his statement up. He really said this:
The choice this November is tragic. As it often happens in life, this choice is between bad and worse, not bad and good.
But America has made that choice before. When forced to choose between bad and worse, we supported Joseph Stalin against Adolf Hitler, and we supported right-wing authoritarians against Communist totalitarians.
You may say (if you’re paying attention here), hey, he’s using hyperbole. We had to stop Hitler, so we had no choice but to throw in our fortunes with a man who killed 50 million people. (My father used to say, “I don’t know why people are so fixated on Hitler. Stalin was far worse.” And remember: my father volunteered to go fight in World War II even though he was a pacifist Mennonite, because he did believe that Hitler had to be stopped.)
The fact of the matter is, Prager’s comparison is completely unmoored from historical fact. Yes, we did support Stalin, after Hitler declared war on him, which was after Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact which Hitler broke, and we could have left it at that, helping out the Russians with military aid and opening up the Western Front with the landings at Normandy, but instead we treated Stalin as a friend and gave away the store at the post-war Yalta Conference, thus resulting in the awful oppression of Eastern Europe under Communist rule for decades.
If it means anything, the argument derived from Stalin would be something along the lines of, “Don’t give horrible people one more iota of power than you absolutely have to and then cut them off as soon as you can.” Prager’s Trump-is-the-same-as-Stalin statement is an argument against Trump.
In fact, the comparison between America’s deal with Stalin and our possible deal with Donald Trump is very apt in one way: Stalin betrayed us. He took us for all he could get. Does Prager honestly not know this? All you have to do is look it up on Wikipedia.
I’ve said it many times and here I’ll say it again: No Trump supporter will have any legitimacy left after this election, no matter who wins. My very real fear is that the election will be close, thus setting the stage for Trump’s preposterous and dangerous assertion that the system is rigged (but never, as I’ve said, when he’s getting a bounce) and giving Trump supporters room to say, “If you nasty Never Trumpers had just supported Our Noble Candidate we’d have won! It’s all your fault!” (Or, in the words of Sean Hannity, “You own it!”) I said in my previous post that the position of many NeverTrumpers is that they won’t vote for either candidate and that, while I don’t’ agree with that position, I can respect it. But folks, I think the time has come for me to stop excusing this Pontius Pilatism. More on that tomorrow.
In the meantime, since I’m assuming you have nothing else to do but read articles about the election, a choice set of eviscerations:
“Nope!!! Still Not Convinced to Vote for Trump” in RedState, May 24, 2016.
“Dennis Prager Is Wrong” in The Resurgent, Sept. 7, 2016
“What Supporting Donald Trump Did to Dennis Prager’s Principles” in The Atlantic, Sept. 7, 2016