Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton compared former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler during her Wednesday appearance on “The View.”
Clinton, who lost to Trump in the 2016 election, said Trump showed “dictatorial tendencies” when he assumed office in Jan. 2017. She then warned that he will be “even worse” if he wins reelection in 2024, describing the likely result as “the end of our country as we know it.”
“Literally, from his inauguration on, it was nothing but accusing people of things, making up facts, denying the size of the crowd at his own inauguration, and everything that I worried about I saw unfolding, and so I think that he’d be even worse now because he was somewhat restrained, believe it or not, in the first term by people who he hired because he thought they would go along with him and they stood up to him,” Clinton said. “And so now, he is going to, if he were ever near the Oval Office again, find people who have no principles, no conscience, who are totally tied to his fortunes, literally, and therefore would do whatever he said. And so the wreckage is almost unimaginable.”
“When I was Secretary of State, I used to talk about one and done,” Clinton continued. “What I meant by that is that people would get legitimately elected, and then they would try to do away with elections, and do away with opposition, and do away with a free press. And you could see it in countries where — well, Hitler was duly elected. And so, all the sudden, somebody with those tendencies, the dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna shut this down, we’re gonna throw these people in jail,’ and they didn’t usually telegraph that. Trump is telling us what he intends to do. Take him at his word!”
“The man means to throw people in jail who disagree with him, shut down legitimate press outlets, do what he can to literally undermine the rule of law and our country’s values,” she added. (RELATED: Hillary Clinton Says Trump ‘Set Out To Defraud’ Americans, Silver Lining Is That ‘The System Is Working’)
Liberal pundits have consistently compared Trump to Hitler. A CNN analyst said in 2019 that Trump’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) “sounded a lot like” the Nazi dictator. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow brought up Hitler as she commented on Trump’s inauguration speech.
“There was an America First Committee that formed in this country, hundreds of thousands of people in this country, some of the richest businessmen in the country were part of it,” Maddow said at the time. “They were formed to keep us out of World War II. They were infiltrated by the Nazis, many of them are antisemitic, which is part of why they weren’t alarmed by Hitler’s rise in Germany.”
Democratic South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn also compared Trump to Hitler in a 2017 interview with CNN and warned that the U.S. was moving closer to Nazi Germany.