Charlie Tribalew/Pool/AP
Former President Donald Trump speaks to the media upon returning to his trial in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York, May 3, 2024.
Editor's note: Former attorney Dean Obidala is the host of the daily program “The Dean Obidala Show” on SiriusXM radio. Follow him on the thread. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion pieces on CNN.
CNN —
At the Republican National Committee's annual dinner this weekend, former President Donald Trump took to the stage and the J6 Prison Choir recorded the national anthem. Members of the choir have been jailed for participating in violent efforts to keep President Trump in power. his defeat in the 2020 election;
This is not the first time President Trump has opened an event by playing the song celebrating the January 6, 2021, attackers. Every time he does that, patriotic Americans should be disgusted. But this wasn't even the most offensive thing Trump did at a private luncheon for donors at his Mar-a-Lago club on Saturday.
Trump launches into a profanity-laced tirade and claims that President Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo regime” — obscenely — that the Holocaust Encyclopedia describes as “an organized Jewish organization.” He declared by bringing up the name of the Nazi political police who were notorious for “deportation.” From all over Europe to ghettos, concentration camps, extermination camps and extermination camps. ”
President Trump's damning remarks were made in a room packed with people who had donated more than $40,000 to the Republican National Committee, outraged by his indictment on 88 felonies in four different jurisdictions. It was part of a 90-minute speech. It is often done out loud in public. At his ongoing trial in New York City, prosecutors say the former president was at the center of what they called an elaborate “election fraud” case that included concealing hush money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. are doing. Mr. Trump has denied the allegations.
It would be difficult to enumerate all the ways in which comparing the current regime to a brutal Gestapo is so offensive and misplaced. That includes the casual use of language evocative of Nazism, something President Trump has done frequently.
First, it trivializes the history of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of the unspeakable crimes committed by Adolf Hitler and his followers. Second, there is no evidence that the current government has authoritarian tendencies. But, as is often the case with President Trump, he has tarnished his scorn with mistakes for which he himself would have been rightly criticized.
After all, it was Mr. Trump who said he would become a dictator on his “day one” in office. As the presidential campaign progresses, it is President Trump whose actions and statements seem to increasingly evoke authoritarianism. And there is, in fact, one presidential candidate from a major party who has repeatedly invoked Nazi language — and it's not Biden.
In December, President Trump sparked a firestorm when he parroted a phrase used by Hitler and described immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of America. Last month, President Trump described his political opponents as “vermin,” a dehumanizing term that has anti-Semitic connotations and, given its use in Nazi rhetoric, many people was concerned. Holocaust scholars point to Hitler's manifesto “Mein Kampf” and speeches that called for racial purity and said that Germany's blood was “poisoned” by Jews.
President Trump has not apologized for using such language. Instead, he told his supporters at a rally in Iowa in December: “I have never read Mein Kampf.” He added that Hitler used the phrase “to poison the blood” of this country “in a completely different way.” He then repeated the same dangerous rhetoric about immigrants, saying, “They are destroying the blood of our nation. They are destroying the fabric of our nation and we have to get them out.” .”
At a time when there is an alarming spike in anti-Semitism across the United States, President Trump's use of the word “Gestapo” and Nazi-like language among major Republican donors at an event on Saturday Was there a commotion over the money? Have Republican leadership ever condemned this rhetoric? I have never seen or heard them publicly criticize the presidential candidate and undisputed leader of the party. I don't expect that either. Unless the past is a prologue.
Interestingly, President Trump's praise of those who carried out the January 6 attack is reminiscent of Hitler's tactics after his own coup attempt in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. The operation was a thwarted attempt by a would-be dictator and his followers to violently overthrow the German government. Bavaria.
Hitler publicly honored those who died in his failed attempt to seize power by publicly honoring them as martyrs and heroes for the cause. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, ten years after he became Chancellor of Germany. One of his first tasks there was the establishment of the Gestapo, Germany's secret police, under the guidance of his loyal aide Hermann Göring.
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At a Republican event on Saturday, President Trump gave anyone who donated $1 million the chance to speak at the podium. Three people reportedly responded to Trump's offer. One such donor claimed that God chose President Trump to lead the nation.
And while the former president spoke Saturday, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, who is co-chair of the RNC, praised the song's success on the Billboard music charts by the Jan. 6 attacker. A commemorative plaque was presented to President Trump. Last week, Time magazine published an interview in which President Trump once again praised the January 6th attackers, some of whom brutally beat police officers, as “patriots” and won re-election. If so, he vowed to consider pardoning those still imprisoned for the attack.
All of this makes us ask ourselves again, who are the presidential candidates who love democracy and the Constitution and who are willing to take us back to dark and dangerous times?
