Stop Abusing World War II History To Bash Trump

By Jarrett Stepman, The Daily Signal | March 03, 2025

I’ve had enough. This really needs to be said. History abuse must stop. If you’ve paid attention to the news recently, it’s been hard not to notice that analogies to World War II have become increasingly ridiculous, especially regarding the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine and President Donald Trump’s negotiations to end it.

Western media and political elites (I’m looking at you, New York Times) appear to have little framework by which to analyze current events through historical analogy other than through the most distorted, movie-like version of the Second World War that has little connection to reality.

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Every single political event and leader is, like a broken record, compared to some bad Marvel comic version of its World War II self. Trump is Hitler. Trump is Neville Chamberlain. Russian President Vladimir Putin is Hitler. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Winston Churchill. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is Winston Churchill and the leader of the free world.

Stop!

For a time when millennials were coming of political age, the Harry Potter comparisons were repeated ad nauseum. The eventual response to Harry Potter analogies eventually just became, “read another book” and eventually the comparisons died down.

And that’s what I’m saying now. Pick another event in history besides World War II, please.

It isn’t always Munich in 1938. Not every politician you don’t like is Hitler. Not every aggressive foreign power is the Third Reich. And not every attempt at peace is Neville Chamberlain-like “appeasement.”

And if you are going to go with a World War II history analogy, at least get the facts straight.

I’d like to make this point about Churchill based on actual history because there has been quite a bit of digital ink spilled in claiming that Zelenskyy is like Churchill and that criticizing him is like the U.S. suddenly stabbing Churchill in the back while he was fighting Nazis.

Frankly, Zelenskyy’s public eruption with Trump was very un-Churchill-like. Churchill was a wise and clever statesman who knew exactly the position that the U.K. was in during the war. He knew that, as he said at the Tehran Conference in 1943 with FDR and Josef Stalin, between the American buffalo on one side and the Russian bear on the other, England was no more than a sad little donkey.

So he flattered and gently cajoled FDR and Stalin both publicly and privately. He did everything he could to put on a happy face that the partnership was working out well and that the U.K. was grateful for aid. Privately, he cursed Stalin, a butcher and an evil communist dictator who he was on to long before his American allies understood the threat of “Uncle Joe.”

On FDR, one gets the feeling that Churchill simply flattered and affirmed the American president, certainly in public, even though it was clear that plenty of Roosevelt’s top advisers hated the British Empire and were keen on breaking it up as soon as the war was over.

Churchill didn’t do this because he was such a nice guy or lacked the honor to tell bullies like Stalin how things really are. (Once or twice, he would confront Stalin to his face, albeit privately.) He played the consummate diplomat for his country, which had little hope of survival in a showdown with Germany without American industry and Russian manpower.

In foreign relations, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Churchill played a weak hand as best he could given the circumstances he was handed. Churchill put on a smile and ate garbage for England, and for that there should always be a statue of him outside Parliament and a bust of him in the White House.

But Churchill’s allies didn’t lift him up to sainthood or provide aid without taking their cut from a desperate British Empire—far from it.

I keep seeing this sentiment on social media that the United States should give Ukraine whatever it wants and take nothing in return as reward for their heroism against the Russians. Somehow this is supposed to be comparable to our relationship with Churchill in World War II, which was one of perpetual self-sacrifice.

Wrong.

Certainly, we often fought and died together. But the United States didn’t help the U.K. simply out of charity and kindness. It was a natural alliance of need and common interest, but we also took the Brits for all they had.

The loans the U.S. extended to them—the war material we gave them—came at a great cost. The U.K. only finally paid back the loans from the U.S. in 2006, and it had to do so with interest.

Rightly or wrongly, American leaders were ruthless with an ally of far more consequence and power than modern Ukraine.

We didn’t go running to fight World War II, we were pushed into a deeply unpopular war by world events. And the details of the war and its outcome were far more complicated than the simplistic and sometimes fantastical tales being spun by the legacy media about President Donald Trump’s negotiations with Russia.

So please give the shallow history lesson a rest for a bit and let the president meet with Putin jaw-to-jaw before we rush to war.  

Jarrett Stepman is a columnist for The Daily Signal. He is also the author of "The War on History: The Conspiracy to Rewrite America's Past."

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