ADL says new campaign video comparing Trump to Hitler goes too far
A digital billboard truck sponsored by the Lincoln Project in New Hampshire Jan. 19. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
By Jacob Kornbluh February 5, 2024
The Anti-Defamation League is calling on the Lincoln Project, a super PAC launched by a group of “never Trump” Republicans in 2019, to pull an ad that draws parallels between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Adolf Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany.
The minute-long ad, titled “Translation” and released on Friday, features Trump’s promises to reissue a 2020 executive order targeting “rogue bureaucrats” and “corrupt actors” overlaid on historic footage of Nazi-aligned German forces, and Jews being beaten down by Nazi thugs during Hitler’s rule. The video — part of a series highlighting Trump’s potential anti-democratic agenda in a second term — contrasts Trump’s commitment to forming a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” with visuals of Nazi loyalists giving salutes.
Trump’s pledge to crack down on “government leakers” collaborating with “fake news” and relocate government agencies outside the “Washington swamp” is juxtaposed with footage of book burning and images of burning buildings.
“We’ve heard the kind of promises that Trump is making before, but last time they were in German,” the ad concludes.
The ad was first reported by the Florida Politics website.
In a statement shared by email, an ADL spokesperson said the comparison “denigrates the memory of the 6 million and trivializes the horrific events of the Holocaust.”
The ADL urged the Lincoln Project to pull the ad “and to refrain from using Nazi analogies in the future.”
Drawing parallels between the former president and the Nazi regime has been hotly debated in the public discourse for a number of years. In 2020, a Jewish Democratic Council of America ad contrasted images from the rise of fascism in Europe during the 1930s with visuals from the four years of the Trump presidency. It was condemned by the ADL as offensive.
Trump himself compared the federal indictment on the 2020 election interference to the tactics used by the German Nazi regime, and his allies likened the FBI’s raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in the classified documents case to Nazism. In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, also made a Biden-Hitler comparison.
“Donald Trump is troubling enough on his own and may present a challenge to democracy,” said Abe Foxman, a Holocaust survivor and the former longtime head of the ADL. “But comparing him to Hitler is an over-the-top exaggeration which trivializes who Hitler was and the horrors he brought.”
A Lincoln Project spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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