On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith formally indicted someone who helped foment what turned out to be a failed coup. A special congrats to Donald Trump for receiving his third indictment, not for his classified document scandal — which Smith is also investigating — but for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. By this point Trump should be used to receiving such penalties. But he’s not and this one inspired one of his least chill public responses.
Trump says this is like 1930s Nazi Germany. pic.twitter.com/h7sHsb8c8z
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 1, 2023
Shortly after the indictment was announced on Tuesday afternoon — as he had predicted earlier, and a rare case of him telling the truth — the Trump team released a statement that tried to sound measured but couldn’t help going repeatedly full unhinged.
The statement began by asking a strange question: Why didn’t they punish him earlier? “Why did they wait two and a half years to bring these fake charges, right in the middle of President Trump’s winning campaign for 2024?” the statement read. “The answer is, election interference!”
If conspiracy theories weren’t enough, the statement then went and made an unflattering and sloppy comparison. “The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes,” it read.
The statement didn’t go into specifics about how slowly amassing hard evidence against someone who almost helped overturn democracy was similar to dictatorial regimes. But others accused the Trump team of projection.
Prosecuting putschists to the limit of the law is how you stop democratic Weimar Germany from turning into Nazi Germany. https://t.co/XALhWFf6xt
— David Frum (@davidfrum) August 1, 2023
“Prosecuting putschists to the limit of the law is how you stop democratic Weimar Germany from turning into Nazi Germany,” tweeted The Atlantic’s David Frum, suggesting Jan. 6 was not all that different from Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch, which led to his brief imprisonment.
Meanwhile, hopefully the staff at Mar-a-Lago were smart enough to hide as much ketchup as they could.
(Via The Daily Beast)