The human-rights organization The Anne Frank Center sharply criticized President Trump Wednesday, suggesting there were parallels between the Trump administration and Nazi Germany.
“Alarming parallels of history escalate,” the organization stated in a tweet, which included a bulleted list implying commonalities between Trump and Hitler’s regime.
Some items on the list included “The president creates his own media,” “He exploits youth at a rally,” “He demonizes people who believe, look or love differently,” “He believes Congress should change its rules to give him more power.”
“Anne Frank Center believes Never Again to any people, and now,” it concluded.
Alarming parallels of history escalate. pic.twitter.com/5P708XVa5h
— Anne Frank Center (@AnneFrankCenter) August 8, 2017
Steven Goldstein, executive director of the Anne Frank Center, told Newsweek that the tweet did not directly equate Trump to Hitler. Doing so would “would trivialize the Holocaust,” he said.
But he said that the tweet’s message was intentional. “By the same token, it is responsible, and indeed our moral imperative, to point out parallels between actions taken by the Trump administration today and the actions taken by Germany in the 1930s before the Holocaust,” continued Goldstein. “1930s Germany imposed a series of escalating steps of oppression, including demonization, discrimination and isolation of vulnerable communities, that evoke what we are seeing today. That comparison is just, and not to make the comparison would be a dereliction of our duty to ensure ‘never again’ to any people.”
It is not the first time Trump has been compared to Hitler. Several critics noted on Twitter that Trump’s fiery political speech at the Boy Scouts’ National Jamboree in July was reminiscent of a Hitler Youth rally. Last year, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called Trump’s rhetoric “strident” and likened it to that of Hitler and Mussolini.
The Center has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration in the past. Its representatives called for the firing of former press secretary Sean Spicer after he said, when discussing the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons, that Hitler did not use chemical weapons on his own people.
