Such comparisons are actually a disservice if intended to foster genuine debate or to dissuade Trump's supporters. The Hitler comparisons are hyperbolic falsifications of history - Trump's ideas are foul but in no way on a par with Hitler's, never mind Hitler's actions.
This sort of meaningless name-calling mirrors Trump's own and actually trivialises political debate. It only adds to Trump's lustre to his followers - they, and he, are in need of an enemy and the press sinking to his level is supplying one.
One thing appears certain. His continued presence in the campaign is giving a bad name to the Republican Party and giving its inner establishment panic attacks. The party's self-damage comes from the failure of any of the other candidates to roundly condemn his bigoted attacks on the Constitutional framework that any future president must swear to protect and defend.
The panic is manifest in the coming out of the woodwork of Dick Cheney in protest of Trump's proposals to ban Muslims from US entry. The former vice president, in a recent radio interview, said that "this whole notion that somehow we need to say 'no more Muslims' and just ban a whole religion goes against everything we stand for and believe in".
Everything we stand for and believe in did not deter Cheney from "going to the dark side" and, as he proudly admits, sanctioning torture of prisoners. Oh well, desperate moments in political time attract desperate people.
Two aspects of the Trump phenomenon are genuinely worrisome.
There are his followers. Though they're a small fraction of Americans who have long held the atavistic beliefs to which he's given voice, still his prominence as presidential candidate lends them a new legitimacy. That's dangerous.
Who are these people? The New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks described people who would be attracted to mass movements as follows:
"They are driven primarily by frustration. Their personal ambitions are unfulfilled. They have lost faith in their own abilities to realise their dreams. They sometimes live with an unrelieved boredom. Freedom aggravates their sense of frustration because they have no one to blame but themselves for their perceived mediocrity."
Brooks was theorising about the forces that might radicalise someone to join Isis. Those descriptions could easily apply to other movements including the radical right in America.
Of equal or greater concern are the alternatives to Trump - Ted Cruz, who is now leading in Iowa, and Marco Rubio, the real darling of the billionaire sponsor set.
Cruz has such a reputation for self-centredness that even his university roommate has declared him too dangerous for the presidency. Marco Rubio, the real threat, is a man whose estrangement from facts and manifest political opportunism make him the Manchurian candidate.
In American politics, as in regime change brought by that same country's military, it's best to be careful what you wish for.
-Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.
