This is catching the MOAM's attention today….. when a co-founder of a major progressive magazine spends a whole column running a Hitler scorecard on the sitting president — and lands on “more unhinged than Hitler” as the punchline.
What was said
On Wednesday, September 30, 2026, Robert Kuttner — co-founder and editor of The American Prospect — published a column titled “Trump's No Good at Dictatoring.” The deck sets the mood: “Trump would like to be a supreme dictator, but his demented narcissism keeps undercutting his own schemes.”
Then comes the comparison. Exact words:
“When it comes to both shrewdness and ruthlessness, Trump doesn't hold a candle to Der Führer.”
January 6 gets the full Reichstag treatment:
“Trump was rather more like Hitler on the fateful day of January 6, 2021, when he encouraged brownshirt-style thugs to invade the Capitol and try to block certification of Joe Biden's election. That day was the equivalent of the Reichstag Fire of February 27, 1933…”
And the scorecard keeps rolling — Hitler better at delivering for his base, better at a welfare state, Speer vs. vanity projects — until Kuttner arrives here:
“To observe that Trump is more unhinged than Hitler is of course faint praise.”
Source: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, Sep 30, 2026
Context (not spin)
You can dislike Trump's second term. You can argue about January 6, appointments, inflation, foreign policy — all day, with footnotes. Serious historians write serious books about how democracies die. Fine.
What Kuttner did is not a history seminar. He built an extended Hitler ledger in which Der Führer keeps winning the competence contest, cast January 6 as the Reichstag Fire, and closed the loop with “more unhinged than Hitler” as faint praise. That is not policy critique. That is the Godwin finish line with a magazine masthead.
If the argument is “Trump is a bad executive,” say that. Cite the bill, the poll, the battlefield. What you don't get — not if you want anybody outside the Prospect subscriber list to take the “democracy in peril” lecture seriously — is a column that grades the President of the United States against Adolf Hitler and finds Hitler the shrewder operator. That's not analysis. That's the ward with a library card.
MOAM's diagnosis
Severity: TERMINAL.
When “doesn't hold a candle to Der Führer,” “brownshirt-style thugs,” “equivalent of the Reichstag Fire,” and “more unhinged than Hitler is of course faint praise” all land in one editor's column, we are past spicy progressive punditry and into clinical territory. Presidents can be wrong. Magazines can be sharp. Neither requires a Prospect co-founder to run a Hitler report card and call the worse-than-Hitler line faint praise. Down here in Marblehead we still know the difference between a hard column and a history-channel fever dream with bylines. Save the democracy lecture for the evidence. Save the Führer scorecard for the museum.
MOAM Out.
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