Hillary Clinton says Trump’s Madison Square Garden event is a ‘Nazi rally’
Hillary Clinton has accused Donald Trump of re-enacting a Nazi rally by holding an event in Madison Square Garden this weekend.
As well as being the site of the NBA finals and four Democratic National Conventions, the arena was once used to host a pro-Nazi rally six months before the outbreak of World War II.
“One other thing that you’ll see next week… is Trump actually re-enacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939. I write about this in my book,” Ms Clinton told CNN on Thursday evening.
The former secretary of state criticised Trump for his choice of location, telling viewers: “I don’t think we can ignore it.”
CNN
“President Franklin Roosevelt was appalled that neo-Nazis, fascists in America were lining up to essentially pledge their support for the kind of government that they were seeing in Germany. So I don’t think we can ignore it,” she said.
“Now, it may be a leap for some people and a lot of others may think, ‘I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to say that.’ But please open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country, because I think it is clear and present for anybody paying attention.”
Asked if she agreed with former White House chief of staff John Kelly’s classification of Trump as a “fascist”, Ms Clinton said: “The term fits.”
Mr Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff, said the then president told him that “Hitler did some good things”, The New York Times reported.
Ms Clinton’s comments were met with fury by the Trump campaign, who branded the comparison between Trump supporters and Nazis “disgusting”.
“Hillary Clinton is so messed up from her raging eight-year-long case of anti-Trump derangement syndrome that she forgot SHE did an event at Madison Square Garden when she was a senator, and her husband Bill accepted the Democrat nomination there,” Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, told The New York Post.
“Putting aside her hypocrisy, Hillary’s rhetoric about half of the country is disgusting,“ she added.
Ms Clinton’s comments echoed those made by Kamala Harris, who said she believed Trump “is a fascist” at a town hall event this week.
Republicans condemned the vice-president’s remarks, accusing her of fanning “the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus”.
Republicans Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, issued a joint statement saying her rhetoric “risks inviting yet another would-be assassin” to target Trump and “endangers” American lives.
“We call on the vice-president to take these threats seriously, stop escalating the threat environment, and help ensure President Trump has the necessary resources to be protected from those threats,” they said.
Ms Clinton, who is yet to appear on the Democratic campaign trail, is currently promoting her new book, Something Lost, Something Gained, which came out last month.
The most high-profile appearance she has made on Ms Harris’s behalf since endorsing her was a prime-time speech at the Democratic National Convention in August, when she smiled and nodded as the crowd chanted about Trump: “Lock him up!”
Ms Clinton’s remarks will draw comparisons with those she made during the late stages of her failed 2016 presidential campaign, when she said that that half of Trump’s supporters belong in a “basket of deplorables”.
The outcry over those comments was widely considered to be a turning point in the election and one of the factors behind her electoral defeat.
Ms Clinton is expected to join the Harris campaign trail in the final week before the election on Nov 5, NBC reported.