A couple of weeks ago, there was a brief dustup when Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok started spewing out antisemitic riffs and praising Hitler. Musk apologized. In the ongoing discussions about how far down the path to fascism is the U.S. under Trump, Hitler is often invoked as a dark symbol. But it is important to remember the real Hitler and the real parallels.

In the Hitler timeline, he was appointed Germany’s chancellor on January 30, 1933. That’s ten days later than U.S. Inauguration Day. The Reichstag fire of February 27 gave him a pretext to consolidate absolute power. The next day, he issued a decree suspending civil liberties and allowing the arrest of parliamentary opposition deputies. There followed the Enabling Act of March 23 allowing Hitler to govern by decree. And on July 14, all parties other than the Nazis were banned, completing the dictatorship.

Trump is only slightly behind schedule. The Democrats haven’t been banned; they have just been rendered irrelevant in Washington by a cultish Republican Party spellbound by Donald Trump, and put under siege in the states.

More chilling are the parallels when it comes to sheer cruelty. You wonder why Trump would take away medical care, break up immigrant families, ruin careers in the sciences, deport people to be tortured—until you realize that cruelty is the whole point.