Donald Trump has echoed Nazi themes in his inflammatory rhetoric, says Max Boot, a foreign policy advisor to John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Marco Rubio in 2016.
Root says in 1933, a Dutch communist set fire to the Reichstag, the German parliament, prompting Adolf Hitler to say, "These sub-humans do not understand how the people stand at our side. In their mouse-holes, out of which they now want to come, of course they hear nothing of the cheering of the masses."
"It goes without saying that Donald Trump is no Hitler — there is only one Hitler — and the firebombing of a Trump campaign office in Orange County, N.C., Saturday night was no Reichstag fire," Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in the Los Angeles Times.
"But nevertheless there were some disturbing echoes of 1933 in Trump's immediate response. He tweeted:
"He is creating his own version of the 'stabbed in the back' myth propagated by German rightists after World War I," Boot writes. That violates the "most basic tenet of democracy" — "the willingness of one side to accept defeat at the polls and acknowledge the legitimacy of the winning side."
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