Donald Trump told supporters Monday he is “not a Nazi,” standing in front of an Atlanta, Georgia rally, denying accusations of authoritarianism during the final week of the U.S. presidential race.
His comments come in the wake of recent interviews with former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who claimed Trump, while president, expressed admiration for the loyalty of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi generals. Kelly made the claims to both The Atlantic and the New York Times, and told the latter that the former president “certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist, for sure.”
Comparisons to the Nazi party were only compounded, too, when Trump hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 27 in New York City — the same location used to host a pro-Nazi rally in 1939 that saw 20,000 supporters flock to the landmark for an event hosted by the American Nazi Party.
Trump appeared to respond to the fallout from recent headlines and weekend rally, telling Monday’s crowd in Georgia that his father told him never to describe people as Hitler or Nazis.
“He used to always say: ‘Never use the word Nazi. Never use that word.’ And he’d say: ‘Never use the word Hitler. Don’t use that word,’” Trump said.
Referring to Democrats, Trump added: “They use that word — really, it’s both words. ‘He’s Hitler.’ And then they say, ‘He’s a Nazi.’”
“I’m not a Nazi,” Trump said. “I’m the opposite of a Nazi.”
Trump also used his Georgia appearance to take a shot at Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris, who said during a CNN town hall last week she believes Trump “is a fascist.”
“She’s a fascist, OK? She’s a fascist,” Trump said Monday.
Even Trump’s wife, Melania Trump, clarified that her husband is “not Hitler.”
“He’s not Hitler, and all of his supporters, (they’re) standing behind him because they want (to) see (the) country successful, and we see how — what kind of support he has,” she said in an interview Tuesday on Fox & Friends.
“He loves his country, and he wants to make it successful and to — for all of the people,” she continued. “You know, he — he loves people, and he wants to make this country great again.”
Trump and team appear to be in damage control mode after Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally saw a number of speakers and guests spew crude and racist rhetoric to Republican supporters.
Standup comedian Tony Hinchcliffe made headlines for calling Puerto Rico an “island of floating garbage.” He also made a crass joke about Latinos, claiming the ethnic group loves “making babies,” among other jokes based on racist tropes that target Black people, Palestinians and Jews.
His remarks drew widespread condemnation and at least two Republican politicians in Florida denounced the set, standing up for their Puerto Rican constituents.
Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar said she was “disgusted” by the “racist comment,” and shared that it did not “reflect the GOP values.”
Sen. Rick Scott, too, called out the joke, saying: “The joke bombed for a reason. It’s not funny and it’s not true.” He added that “Puerto Ricans are amazing people and amazing Americans.”
The president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party, Ángel Cintrón, also rejected Hinchcliffe’s jokes.
Cintrón said the “poor attempt at comedy” by Hinchcliffe on Sunday was “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible.”
“There is no room for absurd and racist comments like that. They do not represent the conservative values of republicanism anywhere in our nation,” Cintrón said in a statement, noting that there are three million U.S. citizens in Puerto Rico and nearly six million in the U.S. mainland.
Responding to the fallout from Hinchcliffe’s comments, Trump told ABC News that he didn’t hear what the comedian said on stage, but he also didn’t denounce the remarks.
“I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” Trump told ABC.
His campaign, meanwhile, said the comedian’s comments don’t reflect the views of Trump or the campaign.
And while he didn’t mention the comedian’s controversial remarks in front of a crowd at Mar-a-Lago Tuesday, he said that “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as the Madison Square Garden rally, describing it as a “lovefest” – a term he’s also used to describe the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Other speakers at Sunday’s rally courted controversy with their own remarks.
Tucker Carlson, the ex-Fox host, took a swipe at Harris’ heritage.
“It’s gonna be pretty hard (for Democrats) to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive,’” he said. “As the first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.’”
And Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump known for his anti-immigrant policies, also climbed on stage to share his thoughts on who is — and who is not — an American.
“The cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only,” he told the cheering crowd.
Even tech billionaire and Trump supporter Elon Musk caught heat after people online noticed something odd about the head-to-toe black, so-called “dark MAGA,” getup he’s been sporting at Trump rallies in recent weeks. His black “Make America Great Again” hat, they noticed, ditched the typical font seen on the baseball hats and instead used lettering that appeared similar to the Fraktur font, popular in Germany in the 1930s.
On Monday, Harris told reporters the off-colour remarks at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden were “not new” for the former president, who has been using the run-up to the election to target undocumented immigrants.
“It is just more of the same, and maybe more vivid, than usual,” Harris said. “Donald Trump spends full time trying to have Americans point their finger at each other. He fans the fuel of hate and division, and that’s why people are exhausted with him.”
— With files from The Associated Press