An op-ed appearing in Sunday’s NY Daily News compares President Trump to Hitler YM”S.
The article was written by Karen Hinton who is the former press secretary for NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The following are excerpts of the column:
Normally people hesitate to compare any violator of human and civil rights on a grand scale to Hitler for fear of minimizing what Hitler did.
And, while most Americans can never know what it was like to be Jewish in the time of Hitler, perhaps we after ten days of Trump can start to imagine, especially if we recall what we know about Germany in Hitler’s adolescent days.
In Forward magazine, Andrew Nagorski, who wrote “Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power,” described Jews and non-Jews’ slow wake-up call to the Nazi danger:
“In the very early 1920s, when Adolf Hitler was still only a local rabble rouser in Munich, two men from Munich’s American consulate made a point of observing his rallies: Robert Murphy, the young acting consul, and Paul Drey, a German employee who was a member of a distinguished Bavarian Jewish family.
“Do you think these agitators will ever get far?” Murphy asked his colleague. “Of course not!” Drey replied. “The German people are much too intelligent to be taken in by such scamps.”
Nagorski wrote German Jews and many Americans in Germany thought Hitler would “never act on his most extreme rhetoric, and besides, the donations would keep him reasonable.”
Almost 100 years later, we are hearing similar remarks from smart and politically-seasoned Americans. “It’s all going to calm down.” “He needs to placate his base.” “The Republicans won’t let him destroy the party.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s actions could very well result in refugees being murdered when they return to their homelands. Their lives should matter to the President and to all Americans.
