Donald Trump is facing criticism in the media over his allegedly "violent" campaign rhetoric after he pledged to go after "vermin" on the radical left.

Like a broken record, CNN is comparing Trump to Hitler while overlooking the many examples of extreme rhetoric deployed by Democrats including President Biden.

Trump's "violent" rhetoric?

At a speech in New Hampshire last weekend, Trump said he would "root out" the "radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Despite the strong metaphorical language, Trump did not make any violent threats in his speech.

Still, Biden condemned Trump's language and likened Trump to Adolf Hitler - a comparison that has echoed throughout the mainstream media.

"It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the '30s," Biden said. "And it isn't even the first time."

CNN's Jake Tapper complained of Trump's "dehumanizing rhetoric" that brings an "element of violence."

Selective memory?

It seems the media are suffering from selective memory loss.

Biden has frequently described his political opponents as enemies of America - most famously in a notorious speech before the 2022 midterms, in which, flanked by Marines, he called Trump and his followers a threat to "the very foundations of our republic."

The presence of Marines in the speech, of course, carried an implied threat of physical force against so-called "MAGA extremists."

The media also seem to have forgotten that Biden has mused about getting physical with Trump.

"They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said 'no.' I said, 'If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,'" Biden said on the campaign trail in 2018.

Media distortion

The left-leaning The Hill news outlet attempted to draw a connection between Trump's "violent" rhetoric and Republicans in Congress after Oklahoma Senator Markmawyne Mullin challenged the president of the Teamsters to a fistfight.

Senator Mitt Romney, the exiled, self-appointed conscience of the right, also laid blame on Trump for the "coarsening" of American politics.

“I don’t think that President Trump created something in the population that wasn’t there, but he brought something out that had been held behind norms and comity that is now out in the open,” he said. “Have we coarsened our debates and our dialogue? No question.”

This appears to be another case in which Trump's figurative language is blown out of proportion and distorted by the left-wing press.

In a famous example, Trump exhorted his supporters to "fight like hell" in his speech on January 6th, but in the same comments he urged them to be "peaceful."