After Trump’s visit to Pitt’s campus, it’s clear that he isn’t who we need to worry about

It really comes down to the question asked last November by the New York Times: “If you could go back in time, would you kill Adolf Hitler when he was a baby?”

Now before Trump’s merry band of angry patriots comes out in droves to falsely accuse me of threatening to murder their overlord, hear me out.

When I first heard the (somewhat stupid) question about killing baby Hitler, the answer seemed blatantly obvious. Yes, I would kill him so he wouldn’t grow up to murder millions of innocent people. When I asked my father if he would do the same, he said, “No.” At first, I thought it was because of ethical reasons – after all, he is a doctor who has sworn to do no harm. But when he explained his reasoning, I agreed with him. Killing baby Hitler would be futile.

The question wasn’t really about killing baby Hitler, it was about whether removing Adolf Hitler would have stopped the rise of totalitarianism in Germany. The answer, retrospectively, seems like a no. I don’t think it would have. The rise of Hitler was complex, but the bottom line is that Germany was primed to accept someone like him.

Basically, Germany was ripe for a scapegoat. All they needed was a charismatic leader to pick somebody and spread the word. It was much easier to blame the country’s problems on ethnic minorities than to admit the Germans dug their own grave.

Killing baby Hitler would not have stopped the rise of fascism. Instead, there would just be another (probably more Aryan-looking) leader. Qualified candidates could include Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Gregor Strasser, or any other of Hitler’s equally-brutal and sadistic right-hand men.

My point is this: it is not the fascist, warlike leader himself that you need to fear. It is the culture allowing him to thrive and the core group of supporters willing to do anything for him.

Donald Trump is not who we need to be worried about. (Photo courtesy of Business Insider)

Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are interchangeable at this point. Both are scary ideologues who advocate war crimes, call for violence against religious and ethnic minorities, and possess a horrifyingly anti-woman agenda, among other things. Trump and Cruz won’t win the nomination because, according to Real Clear Politics (RCP), if Hillary is the Democratic nominee, she will win against Cruz and decimate Trump based on public polls asking people who they would vote for if they had to pick between Hillary and Cruz or Trump. RCP data also suggests the same trend for Bernie Sanders against both candidates.

Photo from whotv.com

If these poll numbers hold steady, Trump or Cruz won’t be a problem in the general election. But after they disappear back into Romney-like exile, their followers will still be there.

And they will be pissed.

Hitler and his officials didn’t operate alone. They had a healthy pool of white, authoritarian rage to draw on, particularly from young men and women. Trump and Cruz have that same general trend with their supporters as well.

According to Politico, high rates of the personality trait of authoritarianism—complete subservience and subjection to an ultimate, all-encompassing ruler—predict Trump voters. The Washington Post adds to that assessment, finding that Trump’s voting base skews white, male, and poor. Hitler’s supporters were more widespread demographically, but votes in 1932 for the Nazi Party came from rural laborers, usually lower-middle-class and always white.

Before I receive rage-tweets asking why I’m calling Trump supporters Nazis, know that I’m not claiming they are one in the same. But there are comparisons that can be made, and those comparisons further illustrate my point. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) indicates that the number of hate groups are on the rise, including white supremacists, anti-abortion terrorists, neo-Nazis, and more. Hate groups dropped in 2014 from 939 to 784 after rising throughout Obama’s presidency. But then there was a spike from 784 to 892 from 2014 to 2015, and in 2016, that upward trend is continuing.

Even if Trump didn’t exist, the mess we’re in now would still happen. All it took was a bombastic leader to get the ball rolling. Ted “Bacon Bullets” Cruz or any number of right wing extremists out there would have become the leader of the poor white men’s movement in Trump’s stead.

The face doesn’t matter. The body does.

This was an actual ad aired by Ted Cruz. (Photo courtesy of Politico)

See, Trump and Cruz won’t be able to get into the political system because they’re not electable. Trump is a cartoon character and Cruz is creepy. General election voters are rational people, and they’re not strongly ideological the way primary voters are. Trump and Cruz, by contrast, are erratic ideologues.

But just because those two won’t be in the White House doesn’t mean their supporters will slink back into the shadows.

A woman or a Jewish man is probably going to become president. We have to abandon this obsessive focus on Trump the man and understand that we’re in for a serious problem because of this nucleus of white, angry men. We recently had an open-carry event on campus that coincided with a Trump town hall meeting. I wasn’t concerned with Trump himself in the same way that I was with the “patriots” walking around in “roving units” with guns. They were like the Walmart Rollback version of Hitler’s SS.

The situation is only going to get worse, and, much like killing baby Hitler, the trouble won’t be over after the election when the hydra heads are gone. That group of dangerous, xenophobic racists will still be there, and the sight of their messiah losing to Clinton or Sanders is going to sting bad.

Trump isn’t who we have to worry about. Our fellow Americans are.