Maybe this post is a touch too V&N, but don't these social media posts reflect pretty widespread, standard views among Republicans? Especially circa 2012? I don't see how this is a story.
The Hitler/gun rights tweet is somewhere between factually mistaken and interpretively misguided, but whatever. It's hardly a crime to project your political desires onto WW II. This is far milder than the NRA's view.
The 2012 meme is discernibly racist, but seems tame in retrospect. It is a spinoff of
the 47% meme that was huge in GOP circles back then — i.e. an explicitly elitist politics that aligned the GOP and its voters with productive employment and portrayed Democratic voters as moochers and freeloaders. The "47%" of taxpayers who pay no Federal Income Tax are a real thing; less so now. About half of this group were retirees; most the rest of them were low-income workers who benefited from the EITC, but still paid other federal taxes on income that have names other than the Federal Income Tax — things like payroll taxes.
The racism comes from the implicit association of this group with POC. But still, these days you can hear worse on cable news, nightly — worse in the sense that we've mostly shed the one-step remove from explicit racial grievance.
So this was mainstream political discourse pre-Trump. You might recall that Mitt Romney invoked this meme at a fundraiser, which was taped by a waiter, prompting a somewhat-confusing scandal —
hadn't this been the explicit theme of right-wing criticism of Occupy? — which contributed to sinking his candidacy.
Basically, JDM has just been outed as having been a Republican, along with 30 million of his closest friends.
*yawn*