Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton compared a rally for former President Donald Trump in Madison Square Garden to a 1939 Nazi rally held in the same venue.
Clinton made the comparison on CNN in an interview with Kaitlan Collins.
“One other thing that you’ll see next week, Kaitlan, is Trump actually reenacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939. I write about this in my book,” Clinton said, per Fox News. “President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it.”
“Now, it may be a leap for some people and a lot of others may think, ‘I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to say that.’ But please open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country, because I think it is clear and present for anybody paying attention,” Clinton said.
Earlier in the interview, Clinton said she agreed with Vice President Kamala Harris and former Trump chief of staff Gen. John Kelly in their take on Trump and labeling the former president a “fascist.”
Clinton, who lost the presidency to Trump in 2016, was tentative in commiting whether this strategy would win votes for Harris.
“I think that’s a fair question, Kaitlan. And I can’t wholly answer it,” Clinton said. “But I think number one, you have a duty when you’re running for president — You know, I tried to sound the alarm about him back in 2016 but it was really an uphill climb, because people could not literally imagine that he posed a danger or that his character was so lacking when it came to the responsibility of being president, so I totally understand that, but now there’s just too much evidence about what he wants to do, what he is saying he wants to do.”
Clinton said it is important to speak up if they see something that may not feel right.
“So number one, I think that someone running for president, like Vice President Harris, really has a duty to sound the alarm,” she continued.
“And secondly, I think that there are people who are still paying attention, you know, maybe they’re, you know, leaning one way or the other, and they hear John Kelly, or they hear General Milley, or they hear President Obama or Vice President Harris, and it causes them to think really hard, ‘Why would we take that risk?'” she said.
Clinton, who is also a former first lady, said a couple things are crucial in politics.
“Sometimes, in politics, you’ve got to do what is not only right, but important. And it is important to make a case as well as we can before this election about what kind of man this is and what kind of president he is promising to be,” she said.
Trump’s campaign responded by calling the comparison between the 1939 Nazi rally and Trump’s rally “disgusting.”
Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, told The New York Post, “Hillary Clinton is so messed up from her raging 8-year-long case of anti-Trump derangement syndrome that she forgot SHE did an event at Madison Square Garden when she was a Senator, and her husband Bill accepted the Democrat nomination there.”
“Putting aside her hypocrisy, Hillary’s rhetoric about half of the country is disgusting,” Leavitt said.
Kaelan Dorr, a former Trump administration official, said Clinton’s words were an insult to those who survived the Holocaust.
“This is deeply disturbing rhetoric that is not only irresponsible to use against someone who’s survived multiple assassination attempts … It demonizes half of the country,” Dorr posted on X, formerly Twitter.
“And it belittles the pain of actual holocaust survivors,” he wrote. “Kamala will lose. Just like this nasty woman.”
The rally at MSG is set for Sunday.
When Harris was asked at Wednesday’s CNN town hall if she agreed with Kelly’s statement that Trump is a fascist, she replied, “Yes I do.”
