LANGUAGE Trump’s critics must resist urge to sink to his rhetoric

Last weekend, former CIA Director Michael Hayden likened the Trump administration’s separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border to Nazi Germany.

“Other governments have separated mothers and children,” Hayden tweeted, beneath a picture of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

And that tells you just how far we have descended into President Trump’s nasty vortex of hate and hyperbole. Like Hayden, I was outraged by the family separations and relieved when Trump signed an order Wednesday revoking them. But I’ve also been outraged by the hateful language used by many of Trump’s critics, which echoes none other than Donald J. Trump. Remember, it was Trump who compared the intelligence community to Nazis last year, after an unverified dossier containing compromising information about him was reported by news outlets.

“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public,” Trump tweeted, a few days before he assumed the presidency. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

Um, no. The Nazi analogy insults the memory of the millions who perished under Adolf Hitler. Whatever you think about the leaking of the Trump dossier, it wasn’t anything like Nazi Germany. And if you think otherwise, you need to learn a lot more about Nazism.

Ditto for the tragedy down at the border. To be clear, I yield to no one in my disdain for the president’s immigration policies. But if you compare them to Nazism, then you erode the meaning of the term. And you reinforce our 24/7 slugfest of political malice and abuse, which Trump himself has done so much to advance.

We’re talking about a guy who routinely labels his opponents “psycho,” “wacky,” “sleazy” and more. He has called some of his own appointees “weak” and “lightweight.” And during his campaign, most notoriously, Trump charged that many Mexican immigrants were “rapists.”

Trump doubled down on the last comment Tuesday, during an address to the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “Remember I made that speech and I was badly criticized? ‘Oh, it’s so terrible, what he said,’ ” Trump mockingly recalled. “Turned out I was 100 percent right. That’s why I got elected.”

He might be correct about the political effect of his comment, which helped energize his base of white voters. But it was terrible, by any reasonable standard. It stigmatized an entire group of people by tarring them with a vicious crime. And it insulted actual rape victims, just as careless Nazi analogies discount the unimaginable suffering that people endured under Hitler.

But doesn’t a bully need a taste of his own medicine? That’s what some of my fellow Democrats have argued, insisting that Trump’s uncivil behavior justifies — or even requires — equally uncivil responses.

“Expecting those of us who are scared and angry over what our country is becoming to speak with civility is absurd,” the Guardian U.S.’s Jessica Valenti recently wrote. “Civility died the day Trump took office.”

Please. I’m every bit as scared and angry as Valenti is. But if I engage in the same violent and irresponsible rhetoric as Donald Trump, I’m not “resisting” him. To the contrary, I’m going into the muck with him. That’s not resistance; it’s capitulation.

It also echoes the vile attacks on our previous president, Barack Obama, who was frequently compared to — you guessed it — a Nazi. Just a few weeks into Obama’s first term, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck declared that “Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate.”

During Obama’s second term, as GOP candidates lined up to replace him, the Nazi analogy gained steam as well. Ben Carson, whom Trump later appointed to his Cabinet, warned that the government under Obama was “very much like Nazi Germany.” And in an attack on the Iran nuclear deal, Mike Huckabee charged that Obama “will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

Enough already. As outgoing CIA chief John Brennan said when Trump compared the intelligence community to Nazis, any such analogy is “outrageous.” So is any comparison between Trump and Nazism, of course. You’d think that a former CIA director like Michael Hayden would know better, especially after his own agency was tarred with the same brush. But in Donald Trump’s America, the daily temptation is to sink to his level. And we all need to resist that.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is author (with Emily Robertson) of “The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools” (University of Chicago Press). To comment, submit your letter to the editor at SFChronicle.com/letters.