Trump and his allies insist he's 'not a Nazi'

After some Democrats drew comparisons between former President Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and a 1939 pro-Nazi event held there, Trump and his allies are insisting that he is “not Hitler.”

“It’s terrible. He’s not Hitler,” former first lady Melania Trump said in an interview Tuesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” when asked how she feels about people comparing Trump to the Nazi leader. “All of his supporters, they’re standing behind him because they want [to] see [the] country successful, and we see how, what kind of support he has.”

Trump himself falsely claimed Monday night that Vice President Kamala Harris and her presidential campaign have explicitly referred to him as Hitler or a Nazi.

“The newest line from Kamala and her campaign is that everyone who isn’t voting for her is a Nazi,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Atlanta. “Both words, they use. He’s Hitler, and then they say he’s a Nazi. I’m not a Nazi. I’m the opposite of a Nazi.”

Reached for comment Tuesday, Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that Trump is "correct." She added, "It’s disgusting and desperate Kamala is using this lie as her closing argument."

But Harris and her campaign have not explicitly used that language, although they have drawn comparisons between Trump's rally and the Nazi event and criticized his policies and rhetoric as dangerous and authoritarian. Last week, Harris called Trump a "fascist," a term that the former president has repeatedly used to describe her.

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“Kamala is labeling more than half of the country as the enemy combatants, and she’s calling them all fascists and Nazis, OK, but she’s a fascist. OK, she’s a fascist,” Trump said. He has called her a fascist at least four times before then and referred to the Biden administration in May as "a Gestapo administration."

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, said at an event in Henderson, Nevada, on Sunday that there was “a direct parallel” between Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally and the Nazi event. “And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there,” he said. 

New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal posted on X earlier this month: “Allowing Trump to hold an event at MSG is equivalent to the infamous Nazis rally at Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939."

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also drew that comparison in advance of the event, saying in an interview on CNN, “One other thing that you'll see next week is Trump actually re-enacting the Madison Square Garden rally in 1939.”

In a separate interview on "Fox and Friends" Tuesday morning, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested that comparing Trump to Hitler makes Trump vulnerable to being assassinated.

“When we were kids in this country, we were asked to answer, to consider the moral quandary, would you, if you could go back in time, would you kill baby Hitler before he could do all the damage? And most of us answered, yeah, we would do that,” Kennedy said.

“So when you compare an American political figure to Hitler who is about to become president, you know the kind of people who are ... already a little unstable, you’re really suggesting to them that this man should be killed before he gets into office,” he continued.

Kennedy, who endorsed Trump after dropping out of the 2024 race, said that the former president’s rally at the Garden was “the opposite of Nazism.”

Last week, Harris condemned Trump over reports that he has spoken positively about Hitler, saying, “It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler — the man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews, and hundreds of thousands of Americans."

In interviews with The New York Times released last week, John Kelly, who served as Trump's White House chief of staff, said that Trump "falls into the general definition of fascist" and that he observed Trump praising Hitler on multiple times. Kelly said that Trump “commented more than once as president that, ‘You know, Hitler did some good things, too.’”

Last week, The Atlantic reported that Trump said during a private conversation in the White House, “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.” The Atlantic cited two people who said they had heard the remark.

The Democratic National Committee projected in large letters onto the outside of Madison Square Garden during the rally Sunday, "Trump praised Hitler."

A Trump campaign spokesperson denied the reports, as did the former president, saying that he never made positive comments about Hitler.

Trump's vice presidential nominee, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, meanwhile, once reportedly said that Trump might be "America's Hitler." CBS News brought that up in a question during the vice presidential debate this month when he was asked why Americans should trust that he would give Trump the advice he needs to hear, and not just the advice he wants to hear.

"I’ve always been open and sometimes, of course, I’ve disagreed with the president," Vance said, "But I’ve also been extremely open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump.”