When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto compared Republican hopeful Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler this week, he blew it. He should have compared him to Herbert Hoover.
Hoover, you may remember, was the US president who presided over the country’s Great Depression of the 1930s. He was a Republican populist who, like Trump today, campaigned for raising import duties on foreign goods to allegedly protect American workers. Once he became president, he started a trade war that contributed to the US depression.
In an interview published March 7 by the Mexican daily Excelsior, Peña Nieto likened Trump’s rhetoric to that of Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini. Referring to Trump’s tirades against undocumented Mexican immigrants, the Mexican president said, “That’s how Mussolini got in, that’s how Hitler got in.”
But the comparison was neither original nor suited to be made by a
