In the same week that Donald Trump’s nationwide support from likely Republican voters reached its highest levels yet, the G.O.P. front-runner was compared to Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Lord Voldemort, and Darth Vader. This is what political operatives refer to as some pretty big negatives, and is a further reminder of Trump’s deep divisiveness. When people are debating whether you’re more like Hitler or Mussolini, you are certainly on to something, though that something is not what a normal American political candidate would ever desire.

But Trump, of course, is not a normal candidate. When he was asked by George Stephanopoulos whether he was given pause by the fact that his call to ban all Muslims from entering the United States was drawing him comparisons to Hitler, Trump said, “No,” before attempting to compare himself instead to Franklin Roosevelt. Though Trump hasn’t said it, it’s easy to imagine him taking a kind of demented pride in the Hitler comparison, and one day hanging in his office a framed copy of the front page of the Philadelphia Daily News—which showed him, with his right arm stretched aloft, beneath the headline “THE NEW FUROR”—as evidence that he was, if nothing else, a “huuuuge” deal back in the fall of 2015.

Trump’s most recent outrage has left what William Finnegan referred to recently as the “bien pensant” once again searching for the most effective methods of disarming his still surging campaign. Perhaps major media outlets need to start covering him less, so as to give him a smaller spotlight. Or maybe they need to cover him more, and better expose the dangers and falsehoods of his ideas. This question, what we might call the Trump Enigma, is an old one by now, spanning a couple of election cycles, but no one seems to have cracked the code. Do you starve a Trump or feed him?

On social media, meanwhile, Trump’s critics seem game to match Trump’s own hysterical hyperbole—to fight fire with fire. Hence, the images you’ve probably been seeing recently on your Facebook or Twitter feeds: a GIF of Mussolini and Trump, side by side, making eerily similar, clownish facial movements; or of a list of offenses shared by both Hitler and Trump (the use of “racism to rise to power,” calls for “mass deportations”); or, more simply, one of the many images of Donald Trump with a Hitler mustache above his lip. (In real life, this week, in Atlanta, someone put up posters featuring Trump on a swastika.) These examples, and others like them, have been created and shared out of what appears to be an earnest concern about the outrageousness of Trump’s political statements, and to sound an alarm about the dangers that his candidacy might pose to the country. Perhaps if enough people share these memes, the thinking goes, it will act like a social-media version of Sinclair Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here,” and wake others up to the threat of creeping Fascism.

Yet while the frank demagoguery of Trump’s most incendiary statements makes these historical comparisons particularly tempting, he is just the most recent in a line of American politicians to be, in effect, Hitlerized. Hillary Clinton has been reimagined as “Hitlary,” and when Barack Obama, with his plans for extended health coverage, wasn’t being portrayed as the Joker, he was shown made up like the Fuhrer. Before that, it was George W. Bush who was Hitler. This may just be a particularly potent example of what is known as Godwin’s law, which has it, more or less, that every argument will eventually devolve into one side referring to the other as Nazis. When it comes to popular critical memes of our political leaders, Americans have both short memories and limited imaginations.

This week, I spoke to Gavriel Rosenfeld, a professor of history at Fairfield University, who has written extensively on the ways in which Hitler and the Nazi past has been absorbed, reflected, and appropriated in modern political and popular culture. In his most recent book, “Hi Hitler!,” he writes about the increasing references to Hitler and Nazism in contemporary political discourse, as well as the rise of Hitler memes on the Internet, which include countless ironic image macros, the rendering of Hitlerized Teletubby and Hello Kitty characters, and the popularity of “Downfall” video parodies.

“It’s a two-way street that exists for all these Hitler comparisons,” Rosenfeld said, referring to the propensity of Americans to cast their political villains as the ultimate example of evil. “On the one hand, the severity of Hitler gets diluted. And on the other hand, in the opposite direction, it becomes incredibly alarmist about the present dangers, when a threat is considered no less serious than that posed by the Nazis.”

In effect, these comparisons not only diminish the brutal realities of Nazism but, in a way, perversely elevate a figure like Trump, exaggerating his consequence at the same time that they muddle the real perniciousness of his ideology. If every politician is like Hitler, than what do you call someone who is really bad? Rosenfeld emphasized that he disagreed with Trump on nearly every issue, but said that there were plenty of homegrown versions of Trump’s kind of rhetoric readily at hand in the history of the United States, including the nineteenth-century Nativist movement, making a reach back to Berlin in the nineteen-thirties not only historically inaccurate, but unnecessary.

“The idea that Donald Trump is a Fascist or a Nazi artificially distinguishes him from the rest of the Republican field,” he said. “A claim that he is a Fascist means that the others are somehow qualitatively different. And while Trump is clearly more rhetorically extreme, he shares much in common with the nativism and nationalism of the other Republican candidates.”

Yet these Trump memes are not just a form of readily shareable Internet activism. They also provide a degree of comfort for those who post and exchange them—offering a way to identify with the like-minded, to be among those who can see Trump for what they think he truly is. Of course, the fact that Trump is not truly like Hitler, or that the circumstances of this campaign are far different from those in Weimar Germany that allowed Hitler to rise to power, becomes beside the point. You’d probably rather be on the side that calls Trump Hitler than on the one that supports him on Facebook. (There’s a new shaming site, friendswholiketrump.com, which redirects you to a list of all your Facebook friends who have liked the Donald.)

More than that, they provide moments of undeniable, though perhaps rather odd, comic relief. The sight of Donald Trump with a blond Hitler mustache joins the thousands of other images of Hitlerized public figures—as something to laugh at, but not much more. “Hitler is doing double duty as a symbol of evil and a symbol of comedy,” Rosenfeld said. “When I ask my undergraduates, they are just as likely to see symbols of Nazism as a source of humor as something serious. By playing the whole Nazi topic for comedy, unconsciously we are becoming conditioned for that. Every time the Nazis appear in the frame, we know that we’re all going to be laughing at the end of it.”