Stephen Colbert calls out Trump for ‘scary’ Hitler comparison

Stephen Colbert has called out Donald Trump for the former president’s “scary” apparent similarities to Adolf Hitler – after his anti-immigrant rhetoric sparked comparisons to the Nazi leader.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire over the weekend, Mr Trump was accused of amplifying fascist language when discussing his anti-immigrant agenda.

“They’re poisoning the blood of the country,” he said. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America. Not just the three or four countries we think about. But all over the world they’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia.”

Mr Trump later repeated his comments in a post on Truth Social.

“Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions” and into the US, he claimed.

The former president’s comments were roundly condemned as a warning sign of his increasingly violent and authoritarian rhetoric, echoing Hitler’s Mein Kampf’s screeds against the “contamination of the blood” and “the poison which has invaded the national body” from an “influx of foreign blood”.

The Late Show host Stephen Colbert chimed in on the criticism on Tuesday.

“On the campaign trail, he has been using some of Hitler’s favourite phrases in the speeches he’s been giving,” Mr Colbert said, before referencing his anti-immigration comments, as well as a speech in which Mr Trump called his opponents “vermin” in another echo of language historically used by dictators.

“Biden’s campaign has noticed Trump’s fascist speeches and they’ve continually linked Trump to Hitler,” Mr Colbert said.

“Now that comparison is admittedly extreme,” he added. “But you see, there’s something called ‘Godwin’s law,’ which states that any time people start fighting on the internet, someone will inevitably reach for the Hitler comparison.”

“Because of this, some say comparing Trump to Hitler is just more internet hyperbole,” Mr Colbert explained.

But the late-night host was not convinced by this argument.

“You know who doesn’t say that?” Mr Colbert asked, before reading out a headline which states the creator of Godwin’s Law, Mike Godwin “says the Hitler comparison is apt”.

“Ok, that’s scary. That’s like the guy who invented the five-second rule saying ‘Do not eat that cheeto off the floor! That’s what Hitler would do,’” Mr Colbert said.

This isn’t the first time Mr Trump has been accused of amplifying rhetoric used by dictators.

In 2021, Mr Trump was accused of replicating the infamous line from Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels in a speech in Florida: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

Mr Trump made the comments in reference to the alleged disinformation directed at him and other Republicans.

“If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you,” he said.

Meanwhile, in a 1990 Vanity Fair article which resurfaced this week, Marie Brenner alleged Mr Trump’s ex-wife Ivana Trump “told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed”.

In the article, Ms Brenner wrote that she asked Mr Trump about the truth of the anecdote, to which he replied: “It was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.”

Mr Davis is then quoted as telling the journalist: “I did give him a book about Hitler. But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”

Elsewhere in the piece, Ms Brenner quoted Ivana as saying that a friend of Mr Trump’s “clicks his heels and says, ‘Heil Hitler,’ possibly as a family joke” whenever he visits him in his office.