Chuck Devore writes for the Federalist about disturbing new information from Google.
In the heated arena of American politics, words have always been weapons. But over the past year, the left’s rhetoric has escalated to a level that not only poisons discourse but also incites violence.
As we approach the end of President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House, a year marred by political assassinations and rising extremism, it’s useful to understand just how much Democrats and their allies in media, academia, rent-a-mob, and activist circles have ramped up incendiary language.
Today, equating President Trump and his supporters with history’s most reviled tyrants isn’t mere hyperbole, it’s calculated — having failed at lawfare and impeachment, the left-wing opposition to MAGA is now rationalizing physical harm to opponents.
Consider data from Google. Looking at the indexed incidence of terms linking Trump to authoritarian evils, we see that, normalized against “water.” a neutral word, to account for growth in overall search volume, the pairing of “Trump” with either “Hitler,” “Nazi,” or “fascist” was flat from January 2015 through the first half of 2024, but spikes after the first assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024.
Comparing the first six months of 2015 to the period from July 1 to Sept. 27, 2025, the increases are eye-popping. The relative use of “Hitler + Trump” in articles, social media posts, and other indexed online content rose by a factor of 7.18, a 618% increase. “Nazi + Trump” jumped 13.4 times, or 1,244%. Most alarmingly, “Fascist + Trump” skyrocketed 26.7 times, a 2,572% surge.
Before Trump was elected in 2016, we saw the deadly rhetorical infection slowly spread among the worded elite, from “Fascism in Donald Trump’s United States,” in December 2015 in the Monthly Review, to “The theory of political leadership that Donald Trump shares with Adolf Hitler” in July 2016 in The Washington Post, and even “Seeing Hitler Everywhere ‘As a rule Hitler comparisons are not about fairness. They have a political purpose,’” in The Atlantic. The idea was planted and slowly took root.
