Former president Donald Trump speaks at a rally at Madison Square Garden, New York, Oct. 27, 2024. (Peter W. Stevenson /The Washington Post via Getty Images)
(JTA) — Donald Trump has continued to push back on accusations that he is a fascist, telling a crowd at a recent rally, “I’m not Hitler.”
The assertion at an event in North Carolina on Wednesday came two days after he told a crowd in Georgia that he was “not a Nazi.” Trump’s continued emphasis on the point reflects how much the fascism accusation has taken the spotlight in the final days of his race with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.
Harris and her allies have accused Trump of being a fascist, based on interviews with former Trump chief of staff John Kelly, who said the former president fits the label. The Atlantic also reported recently that, according to two of his staff members, Trump wished he had the “kind of generals that Hitler had.” At the North Carolina rally, recalling advice from his father, Trump distanced himself from the Nazi dictator.
“He always used to tell me, ‘Never use the word Nazi, and never use the word Hitler,’” Trump recalled to applause. “Now we’re called ‘Nazis’ and I’m called ‘Hitler.’ I’m not Hitler.”
The Trump campaign has consistently slammed the ‘fascist’ accusation, which Trump and his supporters have also applied to Harris. In a Trump campaign ad last week, a Holocaust survivor said the label was offensive and called on Harris to apologize to his murdered family members.
Trump has rejected associations with Nazism before as well. After saying in 2023 that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump denied taking the phrase from Adolf Hitler’s manifesto.“They don’t like it when I said that,” the former president said. “And I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that’ — in a much different way.”
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