(NewsNation) — Former Vice President Al Gore compared the Trump administration to the Third Reich in Germany on Monday while giving remarks at a kickoff event for San Francisco’s Climate Week.
“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil,” Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize awardee, told attendees.
“It was [Jürgen] Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell was, and I quote, ‘The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,”’ Gore said, quoting the famed German philosopher and social theorist.
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“He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘Attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’ End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” he added.
Gore’s comments echo those made months earlier by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee who compared President Trump’s 2024 campaign rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden to a 1939 pro-Nazi event at the same venue.
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly echoed rhetoric once used by Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood “poisoning” Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust.
When asked about the similarity, Trump insisted he had no idea that Hitler once used similar words.
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“I know nothing about Hitler,” he insisted. “I have no idea what Hitler said other than (what) I’ve seen on the news. And that’s a very, entirely different thing than what I’m saying.”
Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff warned previously that the president meets the definition of a fascist and that while in office, Trump suggested that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler “did some good things.”
In his 2024 interview with The Atlantic, Kelly recalled that when Trump raised the idea of needing “German generals,” Kelly would ask if he meant “Bismarck’s generals,” referring to Otto von Bismarck, the former chancellor of the German Reich who oversaw the unification of Germany. “Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals,” Kelly recalled asking Trump. To which the former president responded, “Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.”
Trump’s team has refuted Kelly’s claims.
The Associated Press and NewsNation affiliate The Hill contributed to this report.
