Did The Atlantic magazine publish an article titled, "TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER"? No, that's not true: The Atlantic put out a statement saying they did not publish this article. One of the accounts on social media that said the magazine had published such an article stated that its post was "satire." A reverse image search for the alleged article did not result in an image that is on The Atlantic's website.
The claim appeared in a post on X (archived here) on October 22, 2024. The caption read:
Completely insane story in The Atlantic today
This is what the post looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Oct 23 13:38:16 2024 UTC)
The image in the claim was an alleged screenshot of an Atlantic story with the title, "TRUMP IS LITERALLY HITLER."
On October 23, 2024, The Atlantic posted a statement (archived here) from their press room that denied the publication of such article. The opening line of the statement read:
The Atlantic did not publish an article with the headline 'Trump Is Literally Hitler.'
The X account that posted the claim responded with this post (archived here) on October 22, 2024, to a reaction about the headline it attributed to The Atlantic :
It's satire, but The Atlantic can only be lampooned this way because they are deranged
This response also included a Wikipedia link to "Poe's Law," which states that "without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views."
The article the claim seemed to be satirizing is a real Atlantic article, "TRUMP: 'I NEED THE KIND OF GENERALS THAT HITLER HAD.'" This article was published on October 22, 2024.
A Google reverse image search of the picture in the claim resulted in copies of the claim, but none linked back to The Atlantic website (archived here).
More Lead Stories fact checks of claims mentioning Donald Trump are here.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of claims related to the 2024 U.S. presidential election are here.
