Within about a 48-hour span this week, Donald Trump was compared to Adolf Hitler, Vladimir Putin, and a hardcore pornographer – in addition to being characterized as "vulgar," "squalid," and "counterfeit."

Those comments didn't come from Democrats.  Most came from conservative and Republican-leaning journalists.

Writing in the conservative American Spectator, Ross Kaminsky says that Trump's plan to deport illegal aliens is "shameful" and makes a not so thinly veiled comparison of Trump to Hitler:

His plan to require businesses to 'hire American workers first' has the stench of xenophobia backed up by the fist of government. Perhaps as a Jew I'm overly sensitive, but when I hear Trump speak I can't help but think of 'Germany for the Germans.'

Really?  Alexander Hamilton also advocated protectionist policies to favor Americans.  Was he an 18th-century Hitler?  And if it is wrong to advocate "America for Americans" and "Germany for Germans," why isn't it equally wrong to advocate "Israel for Jews"?

In the Washington Post, foreign policy columnist David Ignatius argues that Trump is an "American Putin" – except that Trump is "more nakedly self-promoting than Putin, with [greater] vanity and braggadocio."

And in the conservative-leaning Federalist, David Harsanyi writes:

Donald Trump is porn for nativists. Now, a person can derive much political self-gratification from wishful thinking, but remember porn isn't real. So enjoy daydreaming about mass deportations …but don't let yourself get desensitized to reality.

Perhaps Mr. Harsanyi never heard of "Operation Wetback," the successful mass deportation of illegals conducted by President Eisenhower (the greatest Republican president in the last 100 years) in 1954, during the height of the American Golden Age.

Was Eisenhower a "pornographer for nativists," too?

And not to be outdone, George F. Will, the most intellectual and cerebral conservative journalist in the nation, lacerated Trump in an out-of-character, spittle-flecked diatribe, writing that the Republican Party has the right to "police its borders" from "incorrigibly vulgar" and "counterfeit" candidates like Trump.

Well, of course.  But doesn't a nation have the same right to police its borders from tens of millions of illegal third-world émigrés – including rapists and murderers?

You'd tend to think that this kind of vituperation and invective would be hurled at  Democratic president Barack Obama, who spent the first half of his life engaged in felony drug use and lying about his national origins, and who steadfastly refuses to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed" as Article II of the Constitution requires him to do.

You'd tend to think that such criticism would be levied at a Democratic presidential candidate like Hillary Clinton, whose 30-year-long trail of sleaze most recently includes the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, and an FBI investigation for allegedly wiping clean a private e-mail server containing classified government information.

You'd tend to think that there would be endless disgust with Democratic front-runner Bernie Sanders, who wrote back in the 1970s that women fantasize about being gang-raped and that men fantasize about females in bondage.  But National Review gave him a pass on that.  Can you imagine how the left would have reacted in 2012 if Mitt Romney had ever been found to have written such vileness?

I am not, and never have been, a Donald Trump fanboy.  Thirty years ago, I recall overhearing a bunch of Kiwanis Club guys sitting around a bar in Upstate New York professing their admiration for "Don Trump" as if they knew him personally.  I smirked and rolled my eyes.  Trump is, and always was, a pompous, self-promoting, People magazine-type celebrity, and that's not my thing.  I pretty much ignored all the publicity he generated back then, with his marriages and divorces, and never took him seriously.

Yes, Trump can be shallow and egotistical.  He has been inconsistent on issues.  He opens his mouth without thinking, as he did when he said Oprah Winfrey would be a good running mate.

But the fact is, we could do a lot worse than Trump.  We already have.  Trump would not get 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, as Lyndon Johnson did.  Trump would not be stupid enough to have a young intern orally pleasure him in the Oval Office while being sued for sexual harassment, as Clinton did, nor would Trump issue a pardon to a tax-evader in return for a half-million-dollar contribution to the Democratic Party.  And Trump would not allow tens of millions of foreigners to come here illegally to take jobs from American workers and welfare from American taxpayers and refuse to deport them, as Obama has.

Trump-hatred says more about the critics themselves than it says about the target of their criticism.  "Establishment conservative" pundits and journalists hate Trump not because he is rich, the center of attention, and a shameless self promoter.  (So was Republican Teddy Roosevelt, who was once described by a foreign diplomat as being like a six-year-old).

They hate him because, ultimately, they are more comfortable rubbing elbows with hucksters and con artists and fakers and cheaters like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – and yes, even socialist perverts like Bernie Sanders – than they are with plain-spoken "real Americans."  They are more comfortable keeping company with the Yale-Harvard-Wall Street-Washington clique than they are in Atlantic City or Las Vegas or Nashville.

I doubt very much that Trump will actually become president.  But Trump's appeal to the masses out in "Real America" comes from the fact that he is the little boy shouting "The Emperor has no clothes!" at the top of his lungs while the elite flatterers and sycophants who hate him are writing glowing reviews of the Emperor's new suit.