Donald Trump Jr compares Democrats' policies to those of the Nazis

President's eldest son has been mocked and condemned

(One America News Network/YouTube)

Donald Trump’s eldest son is at the centre of a storm of outrage after he likened the policies of the Democratic Party to those of the Nazis during the 1930s.

Attending the Washington DC premiere of a film by Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative commentator recently pardoned by the president after being convicted of illegal campaign contributions, Donald Trump Jr claimed the movie revealed similarities between the economic platforms of the Democrats and the Nazis.

“I’ve been hearing the left talking about these things - fascism, Nazism on the right - and when you look at the actual history and how these things evolved, and you actually look at that platform versus the platform of the modern left, you say ‘Wait a minute, those two are very heavily aligned’,” he told the conservative news channel One America News Network.

“You see the Nazi platform from the early 1930s…..and you look at it compared to the DNC platform of today, you’re saying, ‘Man, those things are awfully similar’ to a point where it’s actually scary.”

Mr Trump Jr, who attended the premiere with his reported girlfriend, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, added: “When you look at the movie, you’ll see that there is a very distinct and clear difference between what actually happened and what is being sold to our youth today.”

The 40-year-old Mr Trump, who attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with a degree in economics and who now leads the Trump Organisation, was immediately criticised for his comments.

Ron Rosenbaum, an American Jewish journalist and author of Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil, said on Twitter: “No TRUMP JR, you are ignorant of history and should shut up because even more people will be laughing at you.

“The real comparison is between your idiot would be autocrat father, and the Chancellor of the German Reich named on January 31 1933. Do you know HIS name? Say it dummy.”

Experts pointed out the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly referred to as the Nazi Party, was built on Adolf Hitler’s belief that Aryan Germans were superior to all non-Aryans, particularly Jewish people. Hitler’s systematic attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, resulted in the killing of an estimated six million Jews.

Adam Tooze, a British historian at Columbia University and the author of The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931, told The Independent he was unsure what Nazi policy material Mr Trump Jr may have been reading. But he said it was commonplace for conservatives to try and smear progressives by saying the Nazis also had a welfare programme.

He said almost all political parties in Europe in the 1920s supported some sort of welfare scheme. The difference, he said, was that the Nazis were bent on launching “all out war”.

Of Mr Trump Jr’s remarks, he said: “It’s an incredibly stupid statement from someone who is not very bright.”

Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said: “This rhetoric is a shameful and irresponsible attempt to further divide our country. Our nation is better than this.”

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum referred to a statement, originally published in 2015, in response to instances of people “misusing the Holocaust in public discourse”.

“Nazism represented a singular evil that resulted in the murder of six million Jews and the persecution and deaths of millions of others for racial and political reasons,” says the statement.

“Comparing contemporary situations to Nazism is not only offensive to its victims, but it is also inaccurate and misrepresents both Holocaust history and the present. The Holocaust should be remembered, studied, and understood so that we can learn its lessons; it should not be exploited for opportunistic purposes.”

Mr D’Souza’s film, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party, which is based on his book of the same name, has been panned by several reviewers.

Variety magazine wrote: In “Death of a Nation,” the latest smirky documentary screed from the fake-historical-news factory of Dinesh D’Souza, there’s an astonishing section in which the filmmaker displays the legal statutes of Nazi Germany, all to demonstrate his thesis: that American liberalism was, and is, the Third Reich’s ideological sibling. (Yes, he’s really saying that. And no, you can’t make this s*** up.)

Mr D’Souza told the Washington Post he hoped his film would “appeal immensely to people who really want to know what's going on and know nothing about it”.

He added: “I would love to reach the middle of the road guy, the guy on the fence. But I also am realistic enough to recognise that it’s going to be predominantly Republicans and conservatives who come to the film.”

On Thursday, Mr Trump Jr responded to the controversy he had triggered.

“So the left spends the last 3 years falsely calling my entire family NAZIS, but the second I point out the similarities between the economic platform of the National Socialists and the Democrat Party, they scream bloody murder,” he wrote. “Here's what I was referring to. #facts”