MSNBC’s Jonathan Alter Compares Trump’s SOTU to Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels
MSNBC analyst Jonathan Alter compared President Donald Trump to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels Tuesday evening during a post-State of the Union discussion led by host Lawrence O’Donnell.
Trump’s fourth and final State of the Union of this term in office featured many claims, often made during his many political rallies, that can charitably be described as hyperbole. They can also be called falsehoods and lies.
O’Donnell noted that Trump “made history” becoming “the very first president running for re-election while in the middle of a Senate impeachment trial in the Senate, giving a State of the Union Address.”
Alter followed by noting how Trump created “the suspension of disbelief that none of this is going on,” and that “it actually worked for him.”
“He is a master marketer, and he understands, as Mark Twain said, that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on,” said the former Newsweek contributor, before noting what he sees as the ill-effect of Trump’s repeated lies.
“It’s one thing to lie in tweets and, you know, people are absorbing them at different times, and it goes through the news cycle. But when you’re doing it repeatedly in realtime, and part of it is Goebbels, the Big Lie.”
“The Big Lie” is a propaganda trick coined by Adolf Hitler which holds that the more a falsehood is repeated, the more people start to confuse familiarity with the truth. Hitler claimed that Jewish citizens of Germany used it to blame Germany’s loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist and antisemitic political leader in the Weimar Republic.
Alter continued by specifically calling out Trump for “saying you’re protecting people with pre-existing conditions when you’re in court trying to strip them of those protections at the same moment, that’s not just a lie. That’s a big lie.”
“What I think is scary for a lot of Democrats is he’s going to run a big lie campaign all the way to the election. And on a certain level, unfortunately, lying works. People have busy lives. They can’t go to the fact checks and find everything out, what’s really true. And so this speech worried me, and I think you are going to see him get a bump in the polls out of it.”
A corollary to Godwin’s Law states that “as an Internet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler increases, and whoever makes that comparison has automatically ‘lost’ whatever debate was in progress.” In this instance, sadly, it appears that Alter’s point is quite salient and one to be taken quite seriously.
Watch above via MSNBC.
