“The View” panelists weighed in on the increasing comparisons between Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on Monday’s show.
The conversation was prompted by a “Saturday Night Live” skit from the weekend that parodied white supremacist support for the GOP candidate. Hitler comparisons have also been made by Louis CK and Bill Maher, according to the panelists.
Guest co-host Jedediah Bila, a self-described Libertarian, suggested the comparison was excessive.
“I think it’s over the top. I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t like when folks on the right do stuff like that to Obama, I don’t like when folks on the left do stuff. I get that it’s ‘SNL.’ I think you can get away with it on ‘SNL.’ It’s comedy, we all laugh. The problem is it seeps out from ‘SNL’ and you have commentators saying that.”
Other panelists weren’t so quick to dismiss the comparison.
“That’s not fair because he hasn’t immediately disavowed white supremacist groups … “and he has been courting those groups,” said guest co-host Sunny Hostin, referencing Trump’s dithering on figures like former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who endorsed Trump recently.
“I don’t think we can deny the fact that there are a group of people that his message is resonating with and that is a message of discrimination and bigotry and misogyny,” she added.
Michelle Collins took the comparison personally, reading from a 1922 New York Times article in which Hitler’s plans for genocide were dismissed as propaganda.
“All four of my grandparents were survivors, I would say more than half my family was killed in the holocaust,” said Collins. “I look at this and it frightens me. And I know he’s not targeting me right now, but we don’t know. I can’t even imagine being a Mexican person or a Muslim living in this country, how you must feel listening to him.”