“It’s terrible, he’s not Hitler,” said former First Lady Melania Trump this week in an interview with “Fox & Friends.”
She was responding to co-host Lawrence Jones’ question regarding comments likening her husband, former President Donald Trump – the current GOP candidate for president – to the fascist who led Germany during World War II. Adolf Hitler was the leader of the Nazi party and a leading architect of The Holocaust, a genocide of approximately 6 million Jewish people.
During a recent CNN town hall even with Anderson Cooper, Vice President Kamala Harris – the Democratic nominee – said she believes Trump is a fascist. Merriam-Webster defines fascism as: “A populist political philosophy, movement, or regime… that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”
Harris added that Trump “admires dictators,” in her response. Trump has remarked in the past that he plans to be a “dictator” for a day if he gets re-elected and even said in an interview that he thinks Americans “like” when he makes such comments.
At an event held Sunday in Nevada, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Harris’ running mate, compared Trump’s recent rally at Madison Square Garden in New York to a Nazi rally held at the same venue in 1939. At that rally held 85 years ago, 20,000 supporters showed up at MSG.
“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden,” said Walz.
MSNBC showed images of a Nazi rally as it reported on the event. It compared Trump’s labelling of the media as “enemy of the people,” to another dictator, Joseph Stalin of the former Soviet Union, and others.
“And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there,” said Walz of Trump.
Harris and Walz aren’t the only people who have likened Trump to Hitler. Democrats compared the two men last year when Trump said during a rally that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” a line reminiscent to words from Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf.” Trump then said he had never read the book.
Notably Trump’s own vice president pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has also compared the former president to Hitler.
“I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a**hole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America's Hitler,” he wrote privately to an associate on Facebook in 2016, according to Reuters.
Melania Trump was on “Fox & Friends” in part to promote her new book, The New York Times bestseller “Melania”. She told the hosts that all of Trump’s supporters are “standing behind him.”
At the MSG rally, Melania made a rare public appearance with her husband.
“I love New York City,” she said of her choice to attend. Melania added that she has been careful about public appearances after two assassination attempts on Trump’s life this year.
While her husband has been hitting the campaign trail hard with critical remarks about Harris, current President Joe Biden and Democrats, his wife offered a lighter narrative during the talk and even mentioned that Trump knew about her pro-choice stance on reproductive healthcare (a less popular stance among Republicans compared to Democrats and independents, per Gallup poling) before she made it public. Melania told the hosts hopes another Trump term would mean a better economy for the U.S., and “peace in the world.”