NANCY PELOSI HAS said some of the tactics used by Donald Trump, such as attacking the media, are comparable to those used by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Pelosi, former speaker of the United States House of Representatives, was today asked about the recent assassination attempt on Trump.
During an interview on RTÉ Radio 1, Dearbhail McDonald asked Pelosi if the fact some Democrats compared Trump to Hitler “might have contributed, even unwittingly” to the assassination attempt.
The gunman, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, was shot dead at the scene in Pennsylvania last month.
Pelosi, one of the most influential Democrats, disagreed with the suggestion, saying: “It’s a horrible thing, and thank God the President came out of it apparently uninjured.
“But I don’t think that what you’re saying has any equivalence, with all due respect.
“You don’t have any idea what the motivation of that young person was, or his sanity level, or anything else.
But comparing the tactics of Donald Trump to Mussolini and Hitler is a very legitimate thing, if you look at what they did to delegitimise the press.
Pelosi noted that Trump has previously told people at his rallies, ‘if you beat up the press, don’t worry about it, I’ll pay your legal fees’.
“This is a tactic of an authoritarian and in those respects, yes, he had followed their pattern,” she said.
In October 2022, a man broke into Pelosi’s family home in San Francisco and attacked her husband Paul, who was 82 at the time, with a hammer.
In May of this year, David DePape (44) was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
During the trial, he admitted that he broke into the house intending to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage and “break her kneecaps” if she lied to him.
Speaking today, Pelosi described the incident as “traumatic”. She said Paul is “coming along fine” and “making progress”, but doctors told them the assault could have been fatal.
Aside from the physical injuries her husband sustained, Pelosi said another “awful” element of the incident was that Trump and his family, as well as other Republicans, made fun of it.
“[They were] making a joke of somebody being physically assaulted… so that’s where a lot of the trauma sets in.”
She said many people liked and shared posts making fun of the assault on social media, but that hundreds of thousands of people sent messages of goodwill and prayers.
She said the attack on Capitol Hill on 6 January 2021 had also been traumatic for her, her family and her staff, noting that people had threatened to kill her.
Pelosi was instrumental in getting Joe Biden to withdraw from the US presidential race last month, with many people seeing her intervention as pivotal.
Pelosi said Biden is a president with “a tremendous, historic, consequential legacy”. She said, ultimately, the decision to step aside was his own.
In terms of Kamala Harris’ chance of becoming the first woman, and woman of colour, to be elected president of the United States, Pelosi is “very optimistic”.
“She’s the best candidate to win the White House for the Democrats, for the American people.”
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