Donald Trump has centered his unlikely rise from reality television star to onetime — and potentially future — president on the idea that he’s wiser than Washington’s bumbling political class, once going so far as to label himself a “very stable genius.” Facing criticism for repeatedly...
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See if anyone notices a pattern here:
Facing criticism for repeatedly
harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. 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.
“I never knew that Hitler said it,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday, volunteering once again that he never read Hitler’s biographical manifesto, “Mein Kampf.”
“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.”
After he was endorsed by former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard
David Duke during his winning 2016 campaign, Trump insisted he had no knowledge of the white supremacist who had run for office numerous times and is described by the Anti-Defamation League as “perhaps America’s most well-known racist and anti-Semite.”
“Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK?" he told CNN’s Jake Tapper in February 2016. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”
Asked if he would condemn the white supremacists supporting him, Trump said he would “have to look at the group. I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about.” He continued to repeat that assertion even after Tapper said he was referring to the KKK.
As he ran for reelection in 2020, Trump said he didn’t know much about QAnon, the convoluted conspiracy that alleges Democrats are involved in a satanic pedophilia ring and casts Trump as the nation’s savior —
even as he retweeted accounts promoting the conspiracy.
“I know nothing about it,” he said
during an NBC town hall. Nonetheless, he refused to rule it out as false. “I don’t know that and neither do you,” he said.
It was the same when Trump was asked to condemn the
Proud Boys militia group, which was key in organizing the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Enrique Tarrio and other members of the far-right extremist group have been found guilty of
seditious conspiracy and other crimes for their part in the attack, which was part of a desperate bid to keep Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
“I don’t know who the Proud Boys are," Trump told reporters after instructing the group,
during a presidential debate, to “Stand back and stand by."
“I mean, you'll have to give me a definition ‘cause I don’t really know who they are,” Trump said of the group, which was drawing headlines at the time.
The former president's claims about Hitler are particularly notable given his upbringing in New York, home to one of the nation's largest Jewish populations.
Trump has also participated in Holocaust memorial events. He spoke at
a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol hosted by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2017, where he denounced Holocaust deniers as accomplices to “horrible evil." And he
paid a brief visit to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national Holocaust memorial, where he called the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews “the most savage crime against God and his children.”
Trump's insistence that he has not read “Mein Kampf” — an assertion
he also made at an Iowa rally last week — evoked a different Hitler book he once allegedly had in his possession.
Journalist
Marie Brenner reported in
Vanity Fair magazine in 1990 that Trump’s ex-wife,
Ivana Trump, told her lawyer that, “from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”
Trump told Brenner that, “it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf,’ and he’s a Jew.” Davis confirmed to Brenner that he had indeed given Trump ”a book about Hitler,” but it was “My New Order, “ a collection of Hitler’s speeches. “I thought he would find it interesting,” David said, adding, "I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”
