The billionaire founder of Home Depot kind of apologized late Tuesday for likening the populist rhetoric against rich people in modern America to the rhetoric Hitler used in Nazi Germany.
“I hope it’s not working,” Ken Langone said in an interview with Politico. “Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
In a statement to the New York Daily News, he said that had perhaps been a stretch.
“My remarks were intended to discourage pitting one group against another group in a society,” Langone said. “If my choice of words was inappropriate — and they well may have been that — I extend my profound apologies to anyone and everyone who I may have offended.”
Langone is a major Republican donor, but also a supporter of Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. So people of all political persuasions can join hands in feeling weird about this whole thing.