JB Pritzker Insists He Never ‘Suggested Donald Trump is Hitler’ — MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace Adds ‘I Don’t Think Any Democrat Has’
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D), a week after comparing the USA to Nazi Germany, claimed he has never “suggested Donald Trump is Hitler” during an appearance on MSNBC star Nicolle Wallace’s The Best People podcast on Monday.
Wallace, right after hearing Pritzker’s comment, did not push back. Instead, she added to it, exclaiming “I don’t think any Democrat has” compared the president to Adolf Hitler.
“I think it’s a smear that they project back onto critics,” Wallace said.
She then pointed out Vice President JD Vance once referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler”; Vance later apologized and said he was “wrong” for saying it.
But Wallace is either misleading her viewers or suffering from a memory lapse — because there are plenty of examples of Democrats comparing Trump to Hitler to pick from.
To point to just a few:
- Then-Vice President Kamala Harris compared Trump to Hitler last year; she also called him a “fascist” during the 2024 race
- Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) said Trump used the “kinds of words that came from people like Hitler”
- Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) called Trump a “wannabe Hitler” earlier this year
- Hillary Clinton said Trump was “reenacting” a 1939 Nazi rally when he hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden last year
- Then-President Joe Biden said Trump used “Hitler’s language” in a video last year where he called for a “unified Reich”
Pritzker, meanwhile, compared Trump using ICE and Border Patrol agents to crackdown on illegal immigration to Hitler rounding up Jews and other minorities in Nazi Germany last week.
“This is how authoritarian regimes do it. They create these kind of fake ideas that there’s an enemy out there and it could be sitting next to you at one of these tables. So just somebody sitting at your table that you don’t like might be one of those enemies,” Pritzker said. “So let’s round them up, let’s make sure they are the subjects of the laws that we’re passing, because we don’t like who they are. That is what authoritarian regimes do.”
Pritzker, during an event hosted by The Economic Club of Chicago, said he knows Republicans do not like it when he compares the Trump administration to Nazi Germany. But he defended the comparison by saying he knows a lot about the topic after having helped build a Holocaust Museum in Chicago.
“I can tell you, sitting next to Holocaust survivors, that what they will say in this moment is ‘This is what happened. This is what happened — people’s rights started getting taken away. People got accused of being immigrants’ — this is before the Holocaust really took place,” he said.
Pritzker continued: “People were accused of being immigrants, and then laws were passed to limit immigrants. And then people who weren’t actually immigrants were called immigrants, and then it was ‘othering’ people, and that led to a lot worse things.”
Critics would push back on a few aspects of Pritzker’s comparison. For example, German Jews were suddenly stripped of their citizenship by the Nuremberg Laws in 1935. And of course, there are no immigrants being sent to death camps on cattle trains in the U.S.
Watch a clip of Pritzker and Wallace above, courtesy of The Daily Caller’s Jason Cohen. And you can watch the full Best People podcast on YouTube by clicking here.
