Trump’s campaign rhetoric is similar to Hitler’s

Khondoker Usama is a 23-year-old Bangladeshi student at Wichita State University in Kansas. On a recent Friday night he was at a gas station with his Hispanic friend when they were suddenly attacked. Usama, a Muslim, says a white man got off his motorcycle and started hitting his friend shouting, “Brown trash, go home. Trump will win,” and, “Trump, Trump, Trump! We’ll make America great again.”

For months now, the world, and many Americans, have watched with disbelief Donald Trump winning one Republican Party primary after another in the US presidential election campaign. Trump’s tactics employ vicious attacks on his opponents and anyone else standing in his path. His supporters grow more militant by the day. By the hour his Republican opponents appear more and more helpless to stop his bid for the nomination.

It is time to admit that what is happening in America has terrifying parallels to Germany under Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. Now Republicans are drawing that comparison. Citizens Super PAC was founded by two men with close ties to the Republican Party. It released a YouTube video showing how similar Trump’s campaign rhetoric is to Hitler’s. 

The one-minute video uses 10 statements by Trump and follows each with eerily similar statements by Hitler. It opens with Trump wagging his finger saying, “Our country doesn’t win anymore.” Then we see Hitler shouting, “The decline of our nationhood.” A few seconds later Trump says, “The total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Then Hitler this time promising, “The annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” The video ends with the warning, “Americans can’t let history repeat itself.”

Trump supporters have used another symbol of Hitler’s reign, the Nazi salute. A video from a Trump rally shows a man walking past anti-Trump demonstrators raising his arm in a Nazi salute yelling, “Go to Auschwitz!” That video has over 300,000 views on YouTube. 

Hitler is given credit for coming up with the idea of “the big lie”. In a 1990 profile on Trump in Vanity Fair, Anthony Savignano quoted a lawyer saying, “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory; if you say something again and again, people will believe you.” That same article revealed that Trump’s former wife, Ivana, alleged Trump would read a book of Hitler’s collected speeches from “time to time.” Trump denied he had ever read the book. 

Hitler used the big stage to sell his big lie. The Trump campaign is also built around big rallies in big arenas. Like in the case of Hitler in the 1930s, today Trump’s admirers wait for hours to cheer his speech filled with bombast and exaggeration. Hitler had his brown shirts to do his dirty work for him. These thugs were assigned to provide security during early Nazi rallies. That security often turned to assaults on anyone opposed to Hitler. Now Trump followers are on twitter urging, “We need to start #trump patrols to secure the streets.” That kind of vigilante street action delivered the beating to Usama’s friend in Wichita, Kansas. The saying goes, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it is a duck. It’s time to call Mr  Trump for what he is — a demagogue using some of Hitler’s tactics to possibly repeat history with potentially dire consequences for the US and the world. 

The author is a consultant for Zee Media’s new global English news channel