Goldberg, Darrow, and the hyperbolic appellation 

"Listen, I'm 62 years old. There have been a lot of people in office I haven't agreed with. But I have never, ever, seen anything like this. I've never seen anybody whip up such hate. I've never seen anybody be so dismissive."
- Whoopi Goldberg re Donald Trump, on ABC's The View, July 19.

Goldberg's shouted, spittle-flecked claim that President Trump is the most egregious White House menace she's ever witnessed -- one that imperils the world with mammoth atrocities of a type with those perpetrated by history's cruelest monsters -- immediately reminded me of Clarence Darrow's 1924 Leopold and Loeb summation:

I have never yet tried a case where the state's attorney did not say it was the most cold-blooded, inexcusable, premeditated case that ever occurred.

Darrow was certain of prosecutorial motive:

It adds to the state's attorneys to be connected with a big case. That is one thing. They can say: 'Well, I tried the cold-bloodiest -- is that right? Cold bloodiest? -- murder case that was ever tried, and I convicted them, and they are dead.' Or: 'I tried the worst forgery case that was ever tried, and I won that.'

Just so, Trump's indefatigable attackers, whether mouth-foaming in television studios, tapping with lunatic ferocity on mainstream media keyboards, or slithering about halls of electoral authority, similarly lust after the renown consequential to bringing down this season's Most Wanted.

Darrow:

And then, there is another thing. Of course, I generally try cases before juries, and these adjectives always go well with juries: Bloody, cold-blooded, despicable, cowardly, dastardly -- the whole litany of the state's attorney's office goes well with a jury. The twelve jurors, being good, themselves, think it is a tribute to their virtue if they follow the litany of the state's attorney.

Trump is routinely the target of rhetorical brickbats, not unlike the courtroom ones Darrow cited. But the president's assaulters favor fund-raising letter epithets like "racist," "traitor," "treasonous," "liar," and "worst." 

And what anti-Trump rant would be complete without hyperventilated bellowing about Adolf Hitler, Joe McCarthy, and David Duke -- preferably, all three, if the given Democrat rabble rouser can fit all into a single diatribe.

Not unlike the jurors to whom Darrow alluded, rank-and-file Trump opponents surely feel obliged to take up arms against bigotry, never mind that such charges against the president are without substance and only leveled tactically by reprobate partisans. 

Having joined the imagined crusade against hatred in a high place, the grassroots torch-carriers of meager brains congratulate themselves on their quality of character. But they never realize that by misdirecting their ammunition, they allow genuine bigotry to thrive unmolested.

In recent decades, slurs similar to those recklessly thrown at Trump have been leveraged whenever a conservative Republican has occupied the Oval Office. Nixon, Reagan, and the Bushes were also assailed with allusions to and outright evocations of historical evils.

You might think use of those references would eventually be exhausted. But they'll surely spring up anew, when next a conservative challenger to liberalism appears in presidential surroundings.

Clarence Darrow knew outlandish language could be persuasive. Whoopi Goldberg and her ilk count on it being so.