On Monday, MSNBC host and podcaster Nicolle Wallace welcomed Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to The Best People for a truly surreal interview. Within the span of only a couple of minutes, Wallace would declare that no Democrat has ever compared President Trump to Adolf Hitler, then claim that if they did, it would be appropriate, and then sit back and listen as Pritzker did precisely that, all while claiming he wasn’t.
Pritzker’s conceit was to say that he wasn’t suggesting that Trump would throw people in death camps, but that what Trump is doing follows a similar authoritarian playbook to one the Nazis used to amass power. With that in mind, Wallace claimed that the Nazi comparisons are completely appropriate:
You put, sort of, the intellectual architecture around something that, I mean, JD Vance called Donald Trump America's Hitler. It's not a partisan analysis, right? There is an intrigue there that's been noted by JD Vance and reported on by journalists, but you've put some architecture behind the parallels that involve all of us, and you've talked about the first thing you said was people being asked for their papers, American citizens being asked to show up with papers, street vendors being asked to produce passports, rounding people up, and good people looking the other way, thinking, ‘That's not about me, you know, I'm a citizen,’ but who do they go after next? We talk a little bit about why that's so uncomfortable for so many people.
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. steve malzberg
