Kamala Harris: People Have ‘Rightfully’ Found Trump’s Words ‘Similar to the Language of Hitler’
Vice President Kamala Harris told MSNBC on Tuesday that people have “rightfully” found former President Donald Trump’s words “similar to the language” of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
During an interview with Harris on MSNBC’s The Last Word, host Lawrence O’Donnell said:
I wanted to begin by asking you about something that Donald Trump said, and I want you to imagine coming upon this if you were now, today, at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley, California, where you went to school. If you were a girl there now, you know eighth grader, and you’re on the bus on the way home, you’re walking home, and this quote– this quote pops up on your phone of Donald Trump saying, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.” When you got home after reading that, what would you say to your mother? He’s talking about your blood.
Harris replied, “I was raised, as you know, a child of parents who were active in the civil rights movement, and I was raised knowing that there will be some people who will use their voice in a way that is meant to dehumanize, meant to suggest that the vast majority of us don’t have anything in common, when in fact the vast majority of us have more in common than what separates us.”
She continued:
And I would interpret it, I think, then as I do now, which is it is language that is meant to divide us. It is language that I think people have rightly found similar to the language of Hitler, and I think it’s just critically important that we remind each other, including our children, that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based not on who they beat down, but who they lift up. And sadly I think that there is something perverse that has happened in our country over the last many years which is to suggest that strength looks like a bully, when in fact the real character of a leader is someone who has empathy, who has some level of concern and care for the suffering of other people, and then does something to alleviate that suffering.
Trump denied having ever read Hitler’s Mein Kampf during a campaign rally on Tuesday, where he doubled down on his comments that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“It’s crazy what’s going on. They’re ruining our country. And it’s true. They’re destroying the blood of our country,” said Trump. “They don’t like it when I said that, and I never read Mein Kampf. They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that’ – in a much different way.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
