Donald Trump As Nazi On German Magazine Cover Goes Viral After ‘Send Her Back,’ And Attacks On ‘The Squad’
For the past week, Donald Trump has attacked four Democratic women in Congress, alleging that they are anti-American and should leave the United States. The four women have been nicknamed “The Squad,” and Trump has singled out one, Minnesota rep Ilhan Omar, who is a naturalized United States citizen and former refugee from Somalia, for especially intense attacks. At a campaign rally in North Carolina this week the crowd responded to Trump’s attack on Omar with a chant of “send her back,” as The Inquisitr reported.
Omar responded to the attacks, and the”send her back” chant, by accusing Trump of “spewing his fascist ideology,” as quoted by CNN. But Omar was not alone in comparing the rally to the fascist rallies seen in the 1930s and 1940s in Italy and Nazi Germany.
“This was a fascist rally down to its bones,” write Esquire magazine columnist Charles Pierce. “You don’t have to be even a casual student of history to recognize that.”
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz made a similar comparison, while adding the caveat “Trump is no Nazi,” op-ed writer Chemi Shalev said that Trump’s demand that the four Democratic women “go back” to where they supposedly came from “echoes Nazi incitement against Jews.”
Twitter users also saw the comparison, reviving the cover image from a two-year-old issue off the leading German news magazine Stern, an image depicting Trump giving a Nazi-style salute while draped in an American flag, and causing the Stern cover too go viral. Actor and director Ken Olin posted the cover in a tweet.
If he acts like a Nazi,
Sounds like a Nazi,
And Germany’s top magazine calls him a Nazi… pic.twitter.com/BDqv363mNB— Ken Olin (@kenolin1) July 20, 2019
The caption to the image depicting Trump as a Nazi reads, according to a USA Today translation, “Neo-Nazis, Ku-Klux-Klan, racism: As Donald Trump stirs hatred in America.” The headline “Sein Kampf,” the paper reported, translates as “His Struggle,” and is intended to evoke the title of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and manifesto, which was titled Mein Kampf, or “My Struggle.”
A number of Twitter users apparently mistook the cover image, dated from the August 2017 issue of Stern, as current. But in fact, as USA Today reported, the cover was criticized when it was first published two years ago by the Simon Wiesenthal Institute, which said in a statement that the depiction of Trump “as a latter-day Hitler by a major German publication is untrue and beyond the pale.”
The cover was published shortly after Trump’s comment following an August 12, 2017, clash between extreme right, Nazi-style groups and protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which one protester was killed by a right-wing extremist who plowed his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi demonstrators. Trump then said that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the violent confrontation. Trump later praised himself for the comment, saying, “If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” as quoted by USA Today.
