2500% Spike In Google Search Results For ‘Trump’ And ‘Fascist’

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 a week before the election. The idea was planted and slowly took root. 

These weren’t gradual changes. Usage of these pejorative pairings skyrocketed as it became obvious that Trump’s resiliency amid legal battles meant he was likely to return to office.

Deliberate Pivot

After multiple impeachments, dozens of indictments, and what many Americans view as weaponized “lawfare” failed to sideline Trump, the left pivoted to dehumanizing language. Prominent Democrats such as Hillary Clinton likened Trump’s rallies to 1930s Nazi gatherings, while Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz repeatedly branded him a “fascist” threat to democracy.

Even White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and U.S. members of Congress such as Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., echoed these Hitler comparisons, as documented in viral supercuts circulating on social media.

Of course, from a historical and ideological standpoint, both Hitler and Mussolini were, by American standards, socialists and collectivists. By no means did they believe in individual rights. An honest comparison of their policies to the American context would not equate them with the right. But that’s not the point. The point isn’t accuracy, it’s dehumanization, painting Trump and his millions of supporters and now even federal law enforcement officers, especially ICE, as existential threats worthy of elimination — after all, isn’t killing “Hitler” a moral imperative?

Rising Left-Wing Extremism

And tragically, words have turned to deeds. Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10 at a Utah college campus event exemplifies this peril. Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, was allegedly gunned down by 22-year-old Tyler James Robinson, who reportedly scrawled his deadly intent on some of the ammunition shell casings he used during the attack.

Robinson’s social media history revealed immersion in left-wing echo chambers, where Trump was routinely called a Nazi dictator. This wasn’t an isolated madman; it fits a pattern of rising left-wing extremism.

Data from think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) underscores this shift. In 2025, left-wing terrorist incidents have surged while right-wing attacks plummeted. CSIS reports that left-wing violence now outpaces right-wing by a significant margin, with more than 750 domestic terror events since 1994 analyzed and showing a clear uptick in attacks motivated by “anti-fascist” or socialist ideologies.

The Washington Post corroborated this, noting that incidents like Kirk’s murder highlight how “Left-wing actors are responsible for more attacks this year.”

Skeptics might point to reports from groups such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) to suggest that “right wing” violence is the top threat. But ADL’s methodology is highly suspect in that it inflates right-wing threats by including unrelated prison gang and white supremacist incidents. These biased tallies distort reality. The ADL’s 2024 report on extremism, for instance, lumps in non-political violence to pad numbers, ignoring context.

True political violence in open society — from Antifa riots in 2020 to campus disruptions — stems disproportionately from the left. Ask yourself this question: when was the last time any speaker on the left was boycotted or prevented from speaking on a campus?

This isn’t to say conservatives are blameless; heated words cross aisles. But the asymmetry is glaring. Trump called for unity after assassination attempts on his own life, yet Democrats persist with Hitler analogies.

The stakes are high. As Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn chronicled in Soviet Russia, dehumanizing language precedes and justifies tyranny and violence. In America, it erodes our republic. Democrats must dial back the Nazi slurs, or we’ll see more tragedies like Kirk’s. Conservatives, meanwhile, should respond with facts, not fury — defending free speech while relentlessly calling out the left’s dangerous rhetoric.