Democrats pushed a counter-message during former President Donald Trump’s rally on Sunday by projecting a message that he “praised Hitler” onto Madison Square Garden in New York.
Photos and video of the projection on Madison Square Garden went viral on Sunday as the heavily attended rally in New York City unfolded.
The “Trump Praised Hitler” projection comes in response to a recent report in The Atlantic that claimed the former president told his former chief-of-staff, Gen. John Kelly, that he wanted German generals like the ones Hitler had:
In their book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, Peter Baker and Susan Glasser reported that Trump asked John Kelly, his chief of staff at the time, “Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Trump, at various points, had grown frustrated with military officials he deemed disloyal and disobedient. (Throughout the course of his presidency, Trump referred to flag officers as “my generals.”) According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly explained to Trump that German generals “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.” This correction did not move Trump to reconsider his view: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the president responded.
“‘Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” He went on: “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals? And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler.” Kelly told me Trump was not acquainted with Rommel.
While Kelly and former Gen. Mark Miley corroborated that this exchange took place, no audio recording was produced. Trump has also denied ever making the remark.
Since the release of that article, Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign have been openly calling the former president a “fascist,” which some Republican leaders say put him at risk of another assassination attempt.
“This summer, after the first attempted assassination of a presidential candidate in more than a century, President [Joe] Biden insisted that ‘we can’t allow this violence to be normalized.’ In September, after President Trump escaped yet another close call, Vice President Harris acknowledged that ‘we all must do our part to ensure that this incident does not lead to more violence,’” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wrote in a joint statement.
Yet Harris “has only fanned the flames beneath a boiling cauldron of political animus,” their statements continued. “Her most recent and most reckless invocations of the darkest evil of the 20th century seem to dare it to boil over. The Vice President’s words more closely resemble those of President Trump’s second would-be assassin than her own earlier appeal to civility.”