Right-wingers, who support many of the same policies of Adolf Hitler, often attack liberals as Nazis.
This was especially true when President Barack Obama held office.
But in 2016 a genuine authority on Fascism came forward to assess the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination.
“If Donald Trump become[s] the next president of the United States it would be a complete disaster. I think he is acting like another Hitler by inciting racism.”
So said Eva Schloss, the stepsister of Holocaust victim Anne Frank. As a survivor of Auschwitz, Schloss knows something about Nazis.
Eva Schloss
Then 86, Schloss met Anne in Amsterdam as a fellow refugee. Both their families had taken refuge there after fleeing Nazi Germany.
Anne Frank spent four years hiding in an attic and keeping a diary. But in 1944 she was discovered by the Nazis and sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
She was 15 when she died there of typhus in March, 1945. After the war, Eva Schloss’ mother, Fritzi, married Otto Frank, Anne’s father.
Anne Frank
Eva was detained at the same time as Anne and sent to Auschwitz. She survived when the camp was liberated on January 27,1945.
In a January 27, 2016 essay for Newsweek, Schloss warned of dire consequences if Donald Trump became President:
“During his U.S. presidential campaign he has suggested the ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,’ as well as pledging to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico to keep illegal immigrants out.”
She was 11 when her family immigrated to Belgium after Hitler forcibly annexed Austria in 1938.
“We were treated as if we had come from the moon. I felt as if I wasn’t wanted and that I was different to everybody. It is even harder for today’s Syrian refugees who have a very different culture….
“I am very upset that today again so many countries are closing their borders,” said Schloss, who lives in London. “Fewer people would have died in the Holocaust if the world had accepted more Jewish refugees.”
And on February 18, 2016, Pope Francis also waded into the 2016 Presidential race with his own assessment of Trump.
During a six-day trip to Mexico, a reporter asked the Pontiff: What did he think of Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexican border and expel millions of illegal aliens now living in the United States?
“A person who only thinks about building walls, wherever they are, and not in building bridges, is not Christian,” replied the Pope. “This is not the gospel.”
Pope Francis
Francis said he would “give the benefit of the doubt” to Trump because he had not heard Trump’s border plans independently.
But he added: “I say only that this man is not a Christian if he has said things like that.”
Trump, a Presbyterian, responded minutes later: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful.”
Trump has repeatedly accused President Barack Obama—a self-described Christian—as a secret Muslim.
Donald Trump
On February 21, 2016, for example, he tweeted: “I wonder if President Obama would have attended the funeral of [Supreme Court] Justice [Antonin] Scalia if it were held in a mosque.”
Obama had paid tribute to Scalia at the Supreme Court on the day prior to the funeral. He declined to attend the service because his heavy security detail might disrupt the ceremony.
“I am proud to be a Christian,” added Trump, “and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened.”
Nor did he stop there: “If and when the Vatican is attacked by the ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria], which as everyone knows is ISIS’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.
“ISIS would have been eradicated, unlike what is happening now with our all talk, no action politicians.”
Trump thus implied that the Pope’s future security depended on the United States generally—and on Trump in particular.
And he ignored the fact that, since September, 2014, the United States Air Force had been bombing ISIS convoys in Iraq and Syria.
On Easter Sunday, 2019—more than two years into Trump’s Presidency—ISIS bombed a series of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka, killing at least 321 people.
Trump has long been critical of the Pope’s stand on immigration.
As the Pope undertook his trip to Mexico, Trump told Fox Business Network that he didn’t think Francis understood “the danger of the open border we have with Mexico.
“I think Mexico got him to do it because they want to keep the border just the way it is,” he said. “They’re making a fortune, and we’re losing.”
A Vatican spokesman replied: “The pope always talks about migration problems all around the world, of the duties we have to solve these problems in a humane manner, of hosting those who come from other countries in search of a life of dignity and peace.”
For millions of Jews and Christians, the election of 2016 has turned into a referendum: Am I serving the Lord—or Satan?
