Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke said Thursday that President Trump uses “rhetoric you might have heard” during Nazi Germany’s “Third Reich,” listing the president’s choices on immigration, family separation and travel bans as comparative to Hitler.
“Calling human beings an infestation is something we might have expected to hear in Nazi Germany. Describing immigrants who have a track record of committing crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans as rapists and criminals,” the former Texas congressman told reporters in Sioux City, Iowa.
“Seeking to ban all Muslims, all people of one religion, what other country on the face of the planet does that kind of thing, or in our human history, or in the history of the Western world because they are somehow deficient or violent or a threat to us? Putting kids in cages. Saying that neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists are ’very fine people,’” the former three-term lawmaker added.
“You draw your own conclusions, but this is not something I suspected to hear a president of the United States of America ever say,” the Texas Democrat concluded.
Mr. O’Rourke added the country will continue to see these results “if we don’t call out racism.”
“Silence is complicity in what the administration is doing. So let’s call it out,” he added.
Mr. O’Rourke announced his candidacy in March and since then has raised $9 million for his 2020 campaign. He has consistently placed third in polls behind former Vice President Joseph R. Biden and Sen. Bernard Sanders.
When asked to respond to his Democratic opponent’s comments, fellow presidential candidate Julián Castro agreed with O’Rourke’s comments, adding groups of people are”dehumanized” by the Trump administration.
“I think one of the things that that [the Third Reich] did was to dehumanize people. There have been other regimes that also dehumanized people…it’s very clear that we have a president who is bound and determined to dehumanize people to create a fear and paranoia about them in order to boost his own political fortunes,” Mr. Castro said in an interview with MSNBC.
He added the U.S. hasn’t followed Germany’s same path and “we won’t because this country is better than that.”
• Bailey Vogt can be reached at bvogt@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.