Tuesday, October 30, 2024
Year : 2, Issue: 9
Former US President and Republican nominee Donald Trump distanced himself Monday from criticism comparing his rally in New York City over the weekend to a 1939 gathering of Nazis at that same venue, according to news outlets.
“I’m not a Nazi,” Trump said at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia. “I’m the opposite of a Nazi.”
Trump’s defense of himself came after Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has constantly called him a fascist and her Democratic supporters have compared him to Adolf Hitler, the fascist dictator of Germany who carried out the genocide of six million Jews during World War II.
In addition, Trump’s former chief of staff, John Kelly, told The New York Times that Trump reportedly said that “Hitler did some good things” and that the former president allegedly wanted “the kind of generals Hitler had,” even though the Trump campaign denied those remarks.
“Kamala’s now doing something much worse than what she was talking about,” said Trump. “The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that anyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi.”
Trump told the crowd that his father taught him to never say the word “Nazi.”
“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 recalled. “It’s like, I don’t even know why – ‘don’t use that word’ – And then I understood.”
“They use that word – really, it’s both words – ‘He’s Hitler.’ And then they say ‘He’s a Nazi.’”
The negative fallout from Trump’s New York rally resonated Monday after one of his speakers, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, made racist and derogatory remarks about Puerto Ricans, calling the American territory of Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
The latest polls released Monday show Trump leading by a razor thin margin of 47.9% to Harris’s 47.6% in Pennsylvania, according to polling tracker 538, which averages all of the major presidential polls across the United States.
Trump has a planned campaign rally Tuesday in Allentown, which is a majority Latino city with one of the largest Puerto Rican populations in Pennsylvania.
Source: Anadolu Agency