Donald Trump compared Biden's administration favorably with the Gestapo at a private, closed-to-the-press event at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday that was promptly leaked to the press. Along the way, he called Biden a "Manchurian candidate" and characterized special prosecutor Jack Smith as a "thug" and "deranged."
“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Trump said, according to audio of the luncheon provided to NBC News. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win in their opinion.”
“Once I got indicted, I said well, now the gloves have to come off,” Trump added, saying Biden is “the worst president in the history of our country. He’s grossly incompetent. He’s crooked as hell. He’s the Manchurian candidate."
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He also called Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting two federal cases against Trump, an "evil thug" and "deranged."
Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer slammed Trump and the retreat as underscoring that the former president's campaign "is about him. His fury, his revenge, his lies, and his retribution."
"Trump is once again making despicable and insulting comments about the Holocaust, while in the same breath attacking law enforcement, celebrating political violence, and threatening our democracy," Singer added later in the statement.
So what?
I don't like the use of Nazi tropes in political arguments because all it does is render everything said un-serious. For instance, Jill Biden equated removing graphic homosexual pornography from school libraries with Nazi book burnings.
No less an outlet than Politico had commented on how frequently Biden compares Trump to Hitler and how Biden's supporters encourage him to do so.
The approach was informed by Biden’s meeting with a group of historians last year over what he saw as increasingly grave threats to the nation’s democracy by Trump and his supporters. The historians encouraged the president to call out his predecessor every time he evoked Hitler or other dictators.
“I think the president and his campaign have a moral obligation to highlight and condemn language that is so horribly incendiary,” said Jon Meacham, one of the historians who attended that meeting with Biden. “Authoritarianism must be challenged, and things need to be called by their name.”
While calling Biden's law enforcement apparatus the Gestapo might be hyperbole, I don't think anyone can deny that under Biden, the Department of Justice, FBI, and other federal law enforcement agencies have taken on the role of political enforcers. Catholics have had their churches targeted for surveillance. There is a constant drumbeat of claims that rural, White citizens represent some unique threat to democracy while elderly pro-life demonstrators are facing decades in prison, and FBI agents are still conducting pre-dawn raids on law-abiding citizens who trespassed on Capitol grounds on January 6. The Department of Justice has weaponized the criminal code to impose long prison terms on political dissidents by deliberately misusing statutes. The Supreme Court has addressed that particular problem this term.
During Oral Arguments, Justice Gorsuch Goes There on January 6th Defendants and Jamaal Bowman
But if we're going to call Trump Hitler and characterize something that borders on pedophilia and child sexual grooming as Nazi activity, then I don't think anyone has grounds to complain about Trump's statement.
I don't think Biden is a "Manchurian candidate" because Manchuria can do better. But I think a lot of his slavish kowtowing to Beijing is directly related to Hunter and James Biden's business deals, and Hunter's alleged sexual escapades in China have compromised Biden. If any Republican president had profited from business deals with a hostile foreign power to the extent that Joe Biden has, he'd be impeached. Of course, given the standards used in the two Trump impeachments, that is not a very high bar to crawl over.
Trump's description of Jack Smith, however, is spot on. From his thuggish raid on Mar-a-Lago to his deranged staging of classified material there, Smith has shown that he's willing to do whatever it takes to obtain a conviction.
Special Counsel Jack Smith's Team Confirms It Tampered With Evidence, Admits to Misleading Court
Like the January 6 prosecutions, Smith seems about to get a comeuppance from the Supreme Court over torturing the law to get a favorable result.
I understand why the left is upset over Trump using the same rhetorical tactics that they use. He's much better at it and has much more material to work with.