Donald Trump recently made headlines for declaring that “he’s not a dictator.”
He failed to add, “And everyone who thinks otherwise will be dealt with accordingly.”
Nevertheless, his latest fantastical announcement left many critics stroking their chins and murmuring, “You sure about that big guy?”
The facts kind of suggest otherwise, and you can read all about them here!
Donald Trump may insist he’s not a dictator, but allegations of being an unrepentant tyrant have dogged the commander-in-chief for many a moon.
Way back in 2015, following his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Donald Trump was compared to Hitler. This attack on Trump’s character was further followed by speculation that the then Republican presidential candidate kept a copy of the Fuhrer’s inflammatory speeches by his bed.
According to Trump’s ex-wife Ivana, Donald liked nothing more than indulging in a little light reading of Hitler’s speeches at bedtime.
In a 1990 Vanity Fair interview, Ivana Trump once told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that Donald loved to settle down of an evening with a book of Hitler’s speeches.
She explained that, “From time to time, my husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.”
Apparently, when the author of the Vanity Fair article, Marie Brenner, quizzed Donald Trump on how and why he came to acquire a copy of Hitler’s speeches, Donald hesitated and barked, “Who told you that?” Before explaining the Nazi literature came from a Jewish friend.
Trump explained, “Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’, and he’s a Jew.”
The ‘friend’ in question acknowledged that he did indeed give Trump a copy of a book by Hitler but insisted it was not ‘Mein Kampf’ but a book of Hitler’s speeches called ‘My New Order.’ He also denied he was Jewish.
His friend explained, “I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”
Keen to address the issue with Brenner, Trump explained, “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
In the same interview, Ivana Trump also made the damming claim that her husband’s cousin, John Walter, “clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,” when visiting Trump’s office.
When asked by CBC news if the Hitler comparisons bothered him, a characteristically blunt Trump said, “No!” And pointed to Franklin Roosevelt’s ordered internment of 100,000 Japanese-American civilians during the Second World War, as being no different to his proposed ban on Muslims entering the U.S. “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Meanwhile, that bastion of respectable and responsible journalism, The Telegraph, published a picture of Hitler and Trump side by side, and a quiz called “Who said it: Donald Trump or Adolf Hitler?”
The Telegraph then crowed in unabashed glee, “After the tycoon’s call to ban Muslims from America drew comparisons with the Nazi dictator, try our quiz to see how similar his rhetoric can be.”
Fast forward ten years, and Trump is still having to deny he’s not a dictator!
What’s that old saying about smoke and fire?
