Donald Trump’s ideologies aren’t much different from those spewed by Adolf Hitler during his quest to expand Nazi rule, Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters indicated in a recent interview.
The British-born rock legend compared the GOP presidential candidate’s campaign trail rhetoric with that of the infamous Nazi leader during an appearance on the most recent episode the WTF podcast hosted by comedian Marc Maron.
Mr. Waters, 73, said it doesn’t take much to lead to “total fascism and a complete police state,” adding, “it’s always insidious when it creeps up.”
“It was insidious in Germany in the ’30s,” the musician said. “National Trumpism feels a bit less insidious, but it’s just as dangerous.”
Not unlike Hitler, Mr. Trump has been “exploiting the anger, the despair and the hopelessness of people that feel like their world is going away,” Mr. Maron suggested.
“The method for taking over the state and for it becoming a totalitarian police state, is always the same, and it’s always the identification of ’the other’ as the enemy,” Mr. Waters responded. “So in Trump’s case, it’s the Chinese and the Mexicans and Islam – it doesn’t matter who it is. With Hitler, it was the Jews, the Communists and the Gypsies and anybody who had a physical deformity, or whatever it might be, the homosexuals — they were all lumped together.”
“You have to have a population that feels defeated like the Germans did after the treaty of Versailles. So what you have in the States now is everybody’s standard of living is falling, like a freefall, and also where the freedoms that are enshrined in your Constitution and in the Bill of Rights are being slowly eroded and taken away from you,” Mr. Waters said.
The Pink Floyd co-founder said it’s just a “short step” to total fascism from “Amendment 1021,” a likely reference to a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act that allows the executive branch to indefinitely detain individuals accused of ties to terrorism.
Mr. Waters previously took aim at the GOP candidate during a performance at the Desert Trip concert in California when Mr. Trump was depicted on a video screen wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and giving a Nazi salute.
Earlier this week, Mr. Trump’s campaign denounced the support of a newspaper affiliated with the KKK, The Crusader, and said the publication’s “repulsive” views “do not represent the tens of millions of Americans who are uniting behind our campaign.”
The comments occurred during the tail end of a lengthy interview with Mr. Waters heard on Episode 755 of the podcast, published Monday.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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