Joe Scarborough Compares Trump to Hitler for Inciting Capitol Riot

SCARBOROUGH: “Is this America? Jon Meacham, you had brought up Germany in the 1930s. I want to talk about Germany in 1945. But first, it’s so damning. The most damning part of this is what happened while the attacks were going on for two hours. And the President had allies begging him to call off the terrorists, begging him to stop the assault of the United States Capitol. But he had turned his mob against the Capitol because he knew he was losing power. He knew that it was over. He knew the end was coming in 14 days. Anybody who reads history, you can’t help but look back and ask, well, what leaders have actually turned on their own countries, savaged their own countries at the end? And you have to immediately go to the Nero Decree. Because so few have done it. But Hitler’s Nero Decree, in March of 1945, where Hitler ordered his generals to turn their guns on Germany out of spite because Germans had not done as well as he thought they should have done in the war, so to destroy their own infrastructure, to tear up railroads, to tear up factories. But Donald Trump turned his mob on something far more precious, to us at least, than railroad tracks or factories. He turned his mob against the seat of government, the first branch, the United States Congress. I don’t know, certainly there are no parallels in American history. There is no president that has turned his mob against the United States government. And outside of Hitler, I can’t think of too many other leaders throughout history who have actually turned their mobs or turned their troops against their own government when it was obvious they were being removed from power.”

MEACHAM: “Yeah. You know, to me the closest examples goes to Fannie Lou Hamer, goes to the Civil Rights era in particular, at least in the most recent times, where the totalitarian white supremacist violence that shaped our native region was, in fact, state-sanctioned. Who are Jose Williams, Ms. Boykin and John Lewis looking at at the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, when they reached the crest and they looked down? They didn’t see civilians. They saw deputies, posse men and troopers. They saw the power of the state being martialed against their fundamental human rights. And this is that on a grand scale, what happened on January 6th, is you had in the president — and heading up to January 6th. You had the fear, as you just said, of losing power. White people in the Civil Rights Movement feared losing power. So we, white people, in many ways martialed the power of the state, martialed vigilante violence to try to stop it. And what Donald Trump was doing here was lying in the way the segregation was a lie, based on a lie, lying about the election because he feared losing power himself. And the point of America — people say, ‘Is this America?’ Yeah, actually, it is. And we kid ourselves, at our peril, to think this isn’t an important part of who we are. The point, the mission is to make it a diminimus part of the country. What we saw in the last five years with this president is the worst part of us went to center stage, and that’s what we have to fight.”