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With the election a week away, the Democrats and legacy media have found their final message against Trump, namely likening him to Adolf Hitler and calling him and his supporters racist. While that messaging has long been prominent among left-wing pundits and politicians, the comparisons have become more prominent in recent days.

Trump achieved his long standing goal of packing the iconic New York City venue on Sunday evening. The event served as something of a capstone to his efforts at winning over blue state voters, even in Democratic bastions like the Empire State. 

The venue led some outlets, including MSNBC, to make comparisons to the 1939 Bund rally at the same location. “In that place, it’s particularly chilling, because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called ‘pro-America rally,’” the outlet stated, showing footage from the event. “Now, against that backdrop of history, Donald Trump … is once again turning Madison Square Garden into a staging ground for extremism.”

Some of the comparisons drew mockery over their general lack of substance. Conservative pundit Matt Walsh satirized the Hitler references by posting pictures of Trump and Hitler both eating food. “This is deeply troubling. Adolf Hitler was known to sit at a table and eat dinner. Donald Trump has also been documented sitting at tables and eating dinner. Is this just a ‘coincidence,’ or is it yet another Nazi MAGA dog whistle?” he asked, rhetorically.

“We’ve now reached the ‘Hitler drank water, Trump drinks water, thus Trump is like Hitler’ phase of the campaign,” podcast host Ben Shapiro posted.

Holocaust survivors object to comparison

In the leadup to the event, moreover, the rhetoric drew outrage from Holocaust survivors, who asserted that the comparison was far from justified and pointed to his support for Israel while in office.

“I know more about Hitler than Kamala will ever know in a thousand lifetimes,” said Auschwitz survivor Jerry Wartski in a viral video. “For her to accuse President Trump of being like Hitler is the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my 75 years of living in the United States.” 

“I believe that President Trump is definitely gonna be good for Israel because everything that he has done up to now, was in favor,” he added.

But some of the content at the rally did fuel the comparisons, as some of Trump’s warm up speakers made a number of awkward comments or controversial jokes. Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe in particular, made a number of racially charged remarks that he said were intended as jokes, including referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

The remark drew outrage from the left, including the Harris campaign. Gov. Tim Walz, for his part, suggested that Hinchcliffe’s remarks reflect the sentiments of the Trump campaign. “These people have no sense of humor,” Hinchcliffe responded. “Wild that a vice presidential candidate would take time out of his ‘busy schedule’ to analyze a joke taken out of context to make it seem racist.”

“I love Puerto Rico and vacation there. I made fun of everyone…watch the whole set. I’m a comedian Tim…might be time to change your tampon,” he continued.

Harris herself appeared to seize on Hinchcliffe’s remarks by releasing a video appeal directly to Puerto Ricans.

“Throughout my career, I’ve always fought for the people of Puerto Rico. Every chance he got, Donald Trump abandoned and insulted them,” she posted. “As president, I will invest in Puerto Rico’s future so that Puerto Ricans can not just get by, but get ahead.”

The pushback was not entirely limited to the political left, however. CNN’s Scott Jennings, one of the network’s more conservative voices, saw Hinchcliffe’s appearance and remarks as a needless distraction from the campaign’s messaging in its final days.

“Really dumb”

“It’s a stupid idea and really dumb. I mean, there’s no other, no other way to characterize it,” he said. “It was really, really, really, really, really dumb idea and it distracts from, you know, what Trump’s overall closing message has been, which if you look at what he’s saying and you look at his paid ads, which they released on Sunday, it’s really mostly about the economy and about immigration and about how we can have a more optimistic future in America.”

“So, it’s a situation where the campaign, obviously, had a plan to turn the message towards the two issues that work and to a sunnier future and this comedian that I’ve never heard of until yesterday showed up and caused him trouble,” he went on. Pro-Harris legacy media seized upon Hinchcliffe’s remarks with editorial headlines.

“Trump closes with cringe” read the subject line of Monday morning’s Politico Playbook. The Hill, meanwhile, highlighted Hinchcliffe’s comments, but also pointed to comments from other speakers, including Sid Rosenburg, who called Democrats “a bunch of degenerates.”

On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” references to the 1939 rally made another appearance, with former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci drawing the comparison. “My reaction is that was a combination of 1933 Germany, 1939 Madison Square Garden last night,” he said. “What you saw last night is a divisive America. That’s race baiting. It’s all the things that we were doing in the ‘30s and ‘40s.”

Monday saw the release of a Media Research Center study highlighting the difference in mainstream media coverage of Trump and Harris. In an examination of ABC, CBS, and NBC News coverage of the candidates, the MRC found that 78% of Harris coverage was positive while 85% of Trump coverage was negative. This was a departure from 2016, when both candidates received mostly negative coverage, and from 2020, when the difference between the candidates’ coverage was less extreme.

Conservatives, for their part, seem relatively unphased by the escalation of the “Trump is Hitler” rhetoric, which has been pervasive since Trump first launched his political career.

“The left is attempting to ramp up the Hitler talk, casting MSG as a ‘hate rally,’ and a Comedy Central comedian’s obvious joke as a way to rile up their base and turn them out to ‘fight hate.’ It’s all absurd, but that’s what’s happening,” Charlie Kirk said.

“The Far Left press has been going on and on about how Trump is like Hitler, like Mussolini and Stalin combined,” said Elon Musk. “These are people who killed tens of millions of people. Something is wrong with the press.”

With one week until the election, there is little left on the schedule that might present an opportunity for the Harris campaign to one-up the Republicans and “Trump is Hitler” appears to be their closing argument. Whether it will drive turnout as Kirk described remains to be seen. The Trump campaign has doubts.

“I think it’s telling that Kamala Harris’s closing message is essentially that all of Donald Trump’s voters are Nazis, and you should get really pissed off about a comedian telling a joke,” said Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance at a rally in Wisconsin on Monday. “That is not the message of a winning campaign, and most importantly, it’s not the message of a person who’s fit to be the President of the United States of America.”