How Democrats relentlessly ratcheted up violent rhetoric against Trump before assassination attempt — comparing him to Hitler
Democrats’ rhetoric stoking fear and hatred against former President Donald Trump — including repeated comparisons to Adolf Hitler — is coming into a harsh new light following the assassination attempt against him on Saturday.
Trump’s political opponents have long used incendiary language in response to his more controversial statements — commonly casting him as a cartoon villain hellbent on bringing about the end of democracy itself.
Their divisive statements frequently include tossing around words like “dictator” or making overt references to the Holocaust or Nazi Germany.
Republicans now blame this very rhetoric for stoking the assassination attempt that got Trump shot and left a hero firefighter dead and two others critically wounded.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), who is vying to succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell as Senate Majority leader, wrote on X, “Democrats and liberals in the media have called Trump a fascist. They’ve compared him to Hitler. This isn’t some unfortunate incident, this was an assassination attempt by a madman inspired by the rhetoric of the radical left.”
Just last Monday, President Biden himself said it’s “time to put Trump in a bullseye” in a now-wince-inducing quote from a private call with hundreds of democratic donors, Politico reported at the time.
The unfortunate wording brought to mind remarks NY Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman made last November in an MSNBC interview with former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, saying Trump should be “eliminated” over his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
“It is just unquestionable at this point that man cannot see public office again. He is not only unfit, he is destructive to our democracy, and he has to be eliminated,” the District 10 representative said.
Goldman later walked back his remarks in a post on X, saying he doesn’t condone “political violence.”
The official Biden-Harris HQ account also made a post on X in December with the heading “Trump Parrots Hitler” featuring a series of images of Trump and Hitler’s faces juxtaposed with quotes from each, which the campaign alleged were similar.
Casually comparing the former president to history’s greatest monster was apparently also a favorite pastime inside the Biden White House.
Young staffers including aides to President Biden have reportedly taken to calling Trump “Hitler Pig” behind closed doors.
In March, Rep. Vincente Gonzalez (D-Texas), was the target of strong criticism from Republicans after he compared Trump supporters of Hispanic origin to Jews supporting Hitler.
“The rhetoric you hear from the Republican Party is shameful and disgraceful for Latinos. And you know, when you see ‘Latinos for Trump,’ to me it is like seeing ‘Jews for Hitler,’ almost, you know?”
Trump’s 2016 rival Hillary Clinton threw a few shovelfuls of coal into the fear machine during an appearance on “The View” last November, when she warned a 2024 Trump victory “would be the end of our country as we know it.”
“Hitler was duly elected. All of a sudden somebody with those tendencies, dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies, would be like ‘OK 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,” she said. “Take him at his word.”
Comparisons to Hitler or other totalitarian dictators were being made as far back as during Trump’s first term.
Here’s the latest on the assassination attempt against Donald Trump:
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- Trump defends female Secret Service agent who was criticized after assassination attempt: ‘So brave’
Reps. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) uncorked on then-President Trump in 2019 in response to tough talk about immigration, both evoking Nazi Germany in their lashing out.
Echoing his colleague’s remarks at a NYC town hall that same day, Nadler — who recently flip-flopped on his desire for Biden to drop out of the race — played the Hitler card yet again.
“You’ve heard the President and the administration say that immigrants are thieves, that they bring in drugs, that they’re responsible for lots of crime, that they’re – a crisis at our border, they’re bringing in drugs and crime,” said the longtime New York rep.
“Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. And he went about the business of discrediting institutions to the point that people bought into” it,” Clyburn said in an interview with NBC. “Nobody would have believed it now. But swastikas hung in churches throughout Germany. We had better be very careful.”
“This is the same type of propaganda that we heard in the 1920s and World War I against Jews,” he added.
In some cases the horrors of the Holocaust were referenced slyly, and without directly referencing Hitler or Nazi Germany.
In June of 2019, NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew widespread scorn for her careless language when she accused the Trump administration of running “concentration camps” on the US-Mexico border.
The far-left “Squad” member also used the term “never again” in her condemnation of the way illegal immigrants were being housed at the border, which is commonly associated with the Holocaust.
She later defended her use of the loaded language in a Q&A posted on politicsnowadays’ Instagram page.
”I don’t use those words lightly. I don’t use those words to just throw bombs,” she said. “I use the word because that’s what an administration that creates concentration camps is. A presidency that creates concentration camps is fascist and it’s very difficult to say that.”
With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight in the wake of Saturday’s deadly shooting, Republican members of Congress wasted no time pointing these and other examples of extreme rhetoric leveled against former President Trump as catalysts for the attempted assassination.
“The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination,” Georgia Rep. Mike Collins wrote in an X post viewed nearly 7 million times.
Steve Scalise, (R-La.), who was himself a victim of a politically motivated shooting at a 2017 congressional softball game in DC, directly linked the shooting to “incendiary rhetoric” emanating from the political left against Trump.
“For weeks Democrat leaders have been fueling ludicrous hysteria that Donald Trump winning re-election would be the end of democracy in America,” the House Majority Leader said in a statement. “Clearly we’ve seen far left lunatics act on violent rhetoric in the past. This incendiary rhetoric must stop.”
Everything we know about the Trump assassination attempt
- 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks was identified as the shooter who attempted to assassinate Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania.
- Crooks was shot dead by Secret Service agents.
- The gunman grazed Trump’s ear, killed a 50-year-old retired fire chief, and injured two other rally-goers.
- Investigators detailed Crooks’ search history to lawmakers, revealing that he looked for the dates of Trump’s appearances and the Democratic National Convention.
- Crooks’ search history also revealed a broad interest in high-profile people and celebrities, regardless of their political affiliation, FBI officials reportedly said.
- Trump exclusively recounted surviving the “surreal” assassination attempt with The Post at the rally, remarking, “I’m supposed to be dead.”
- High-profile politicians, including President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, addressed the nation about the shooting, calling it “a heinous, horrible and cowardly act.”
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), widely seen as a serious contender for Trump’s VP pick, ripped the Biden campaign for trafficking in extremist hyperbole.
“Today is not some isolated incident,” the Senator wrote on X.
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” he continued.
“That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
