And this brings us to the fourth thing that Biden did by comparing the two senators to Hitler’s satanic propagandist. Whether one supports or opposes their decision to formally raise questions about the Electoral College vote count, the indisputable fact is that their actions were both legal and widely supported by their constituents. A Rasmussen poll released on January 6 found that 52 percent of politically unaffiliated Americans were less than fully confident about the integrity of the election results. The senators, and their colleagues in both houses who worked with them, noted that they had been flooded by requests from their constituents to question the returns from the states in question—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona and Nevada.

Cruz and Hawley incited no riots. To the contrary, they tried to channel the concerns of voters the American way—through constitutional, peaceful deliberations in Congress. Cruz, for his part, denounced the January 6 riot in real time, referring to it as “a despicable act of terrorism.”

By conflating the constitutional, democratic behavior of the senators and their colleagues with Goebbels’ crimes, Biden accomplished a fifth goal. He demonized as Nazis these officials’ voters who had urged them to act—and by extension, threw under the bus the shockingly high percentage of Americans who questioned the election returns.