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lite.cnn.com - on gopher - inofficial | |
ARTICLE VIEW: | |
Opinion: The latest example of Trump’s seeming obsession with Nazism | |
Opinion by Dean Obeidallah | |
Updated: | |
8:01 PM EDT, Mon May 6, 2024 | |
Source: CNN | |
At the Republican National Committee’s annual retreat this weekend, | |
former President Donald Trump to a recording of the national anthem | |
sung by the whose members were incarcerated for taking part in a | |
violent effort to keep Trump in power following his loss in the 2020 | |
election. | |
It’s not the first time Trump has kicked off an event by playing this | |
song that celebrates the January 6, 2021, attackers. Every time he | |
does, it should disgust patriotic Americans. But that wasn’t even the | |
most offensive thing Trump did at Saturday’s private luncheon for | |
donors, which was held at his Mar-a-Lago club. | |
Trump launched into a profanity-laced tirade in which he — | |
despicably — that President Joe Biden was running a “Gestapo | |
administration,” invoking the name of the notorious Nazi political | |
police infamous, as the explains, for “organized deportations of | |
Jews from across Europe to ghettos, concentration camps, killing sites, | |
and killing centers.” | |
Trump’s reprehensible remark, made to a room packed with individuals | |
who had $40,000 or more to the Republican National Committee, was | |
part of a 90-minute harangue in which he groused indignantly over | |
having been charged with across four different jurisdictions — | |
something he often does publicly and loudly. Prosecutors at his current | |
trial underway in New York City allege that the former president was at | |
the center of what they have called an elaborate that involved | |
covering up the payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy | |
Daniels. Trump the allegations. | |
It’s hard to catalog all the ways in which likening the current | |
administration to the brutal Gestapo is so deeply offensive and so off | |
the mark, including the casual use of language that invokes Nazis – | |
something Trump does all too often. | |
For one thing, it trivializes the history of the Holocaust and the | |
perpetrators of the unspeakable crimes carried out by Adolf Hitler and | |
his followers. For another, there is not a scintilla of evidence that | |
the current administration harbors authoritarian tendencies. But, as is | |
so often the case with Trump, he tarnishes the object of his scorn with | |
the failings that he himself could reasonably be accused of. | |
It was Trump, after all, who has said that he would be a of his | |
administration. It is Trump whose actions and statements increasingly� | |
as the presidential campaign marches on. And the fact is, there is | |
one major party presidential candidate who repeatedly has invoked Nazi | |
language — and it’s not Biden. | |
In December, Trump caused a firestorm when he by describing migrants | |
as ” of the United States. The previous month, Trump described his | |
political opponents as “,” which concerned many given that that� | |
has antisemitic connotations and was . have pointed to Hitler’s | |
manifesto “Mein Kampf” and his speeches in which he called for | |
racial purity and said German blood was being “poisoned” by Jews. | |
Trump hasn’t apologized for using such language. Instead, in | |
December, he supporters at a rally in Iowa, “I never read ‘Mein | |
Kampf.’” Trump then added that Hitler used the term “poisoning | |
the blood” of the country “in a much different way.” He then | |
repeated the same dangerous rhetoric about migrants, saying, | |
“They’re destroying the blood of the country. They’re destroying | |
the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them | |
out.” | |
Was there an uproar among the big GOP donors at Saturday’s event over | |
Trump deploying the word “Gestapo” or over his Nazi-like language | |
at a time when we are seeing an in antisemitism across the United | |
States? Have Republican leaders denounced this rhetoric? Not that | |
I’ve seen, and I don’t expect to hear them publicly criticize their | |
presumptive presidential nominee and undisputed leader of their party. | |
Not if past is prologue. | |
Interestingly, Trump’s celebration of those who waged the January 6 | |
attack conjures up Hitler’s tactics after his own in 1923 known as | |
the Beer Hall Putsch — a thwarted attempt by the would-be dictator | |
and his followers to violently overthrow the government of the German | |
state of Bavaria. | |
Hitler would publicly honor those killed in that failed attempt to | |
seize power by making them martyrs for the cause and celebrating them | |
publicly as heroes. Hitler became chancellor of Germany 10 years later | |
in 1933, where one of the first orders of business was , the German | |
secret police, under the . | |
At the GOP event Saturday, Trump offered anyone who would donate $1 | |
million a chance to speak at the podium. Reportedly, took Trump up on | |
his offer. One of those donors . | |
And while the former president was speaking Saturday, the RNC co-chair, | |
his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, on the Billboard music charts of the | |
song by the January 6 attackers. Last week, in which Trump once | |
again praised the January 6 attackers, some of whom , as “patriots” | |
and vowed that if re-elected he would consider pardoning those still | |
in jail for that attack. | |
All this leaves me asking myself once again which is the presidential | |
candidate who loves democracy and our Constitution, and which is | |
seeking to pull us backward into dark and dangerous times. | |
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