WASHINGTON: Donald Trump accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration”, according to a recording heard by U.S. media outlets.
Trump made the comparison at a donor retreat Saturday night at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. The remarks came after he reiterated that the multiple indictments against him were politically motivated.
“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” Trump said, according to an audio recording heard by the New York Times and the Washington Post. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on the reported remarks.
The former president, who held office from 2017 to 2021, faces an array of legal troubles in criminal and civil cases. He denies wrongdoing in all the cases.
Trump has made a series of inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail to lambast immigrants and opponents. He has warned of possible violence if he doesn’t win the 2024 election and has compared immigrants to animals.
In November, Biden attacked Trump for using the word “vermin” to refer to his political enemies. Also last year, Trump said immigrants who entered the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
The Trump campaign has previously rejected comparisons to Nazis, Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs denounced the Nazi comparison on Sunday. “It’s always wrong, offensive, and despicable to make comparisons like this — even more so when taken alongside the former president’s long history of normalizing anti-Semitism,” said Amy Spetalnick, chief executive of the public policy group.
It was “especially heinous to use Nazi comparisons in the service of a bigoted, authoritarian agenda,” she said.
The Biden campaign said the reported comments underscored the Republican candidate’s anger and desire for revenge.
“Trump is once again making despicable and insulting comments about the Holocaust, while in the same breath attacking law enforcement, celebrating political violence, and threatening our democracy,” spokesperson James Singer said in a statement.
On Saturday night, Trump again took swipes at the federal and Georgia prosecutors working on cases against him, according to the media reports.
Trump, a former New York businessman and reality television host, has earlier described Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers.
And after a violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, her equated white supremacists with counter-protesters, saying “both sides” were to blame. Biden has said the events in Charlottesville, where one woman was killed, motivated him to run for president against Trump in 2020.
(REUTERS)
