Beto O’Rourke Pushes Back on Meghan McCain on ‘The View’ Over Comparing Trump Rallies to Nuremberg

Beto O’Rourke Pushes Back on Meghan McCain on ‘The View’ Over Comparing Trump Rallies to Nuremberg

It is no secret that Meghan McCain is not exactly a student of history, as evidenced by this appearance on Bill Maher’s HBO show. Which means that despite having had a decade since to improve, she still walks into rhetorical buzzsaws.

The latest wielder of said buzzsaw is Beto O’Rourke. During his Tuesday appearance on The View, McCain tried to ambush him over heated language he used to describe Donald Trump’s rally in North Carolina last week, saying,

“You’re talking about Trump supporters, comparing them to Nazis and Nuremberg, that sounds extreme to me as well. When Democrats come on here and wax poetic about extremism — I’m not saying Trump isn’t doing it but you’re calling everybody that was in that North Carolina rally a Nazi. So it seems like from my standpoint that the left is pretty extreme in that end as well.”

She kept pushing when he tried to say he didn’t mean everyone at the rally, which led to his saying this:

“Asking four women of color to go back to their own country, and then connect it with everything else he’s doing. The press as the enemy of the people, there is only one path that that will take us down.”

A rally where a demagogic leader attacks the free press as the enemy of the people and calls for the expulsion from the country of disfavored minorities is exactly what happened in Germany in the 1930s, and it is exactly what Trump did in North Carolina last week. It is why O’Rourke and others have noted the historical parallels.

McCain complained that she and other members of the GOP have decried what Trump said, and whoever is the Democratic nominee needs to win over at least some of those Republicans to win the election:

“You have to understand how it looks for people in the middle thinking that maybe I don’t agree with everything that the left is saying so automatically you’re Nazis?”

Of course no one is saying that. What people are saying is that history seems to be repeating itself. And while it is doing so, there are more important issues to worry about than Meghan McCain’s feelings.

Watch the clip above, via ABC.

Gary Legum

Gary Legum has written about politics and culture for Independent Journal Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, Wonkette, AlterNet and McSweeney's, among others. He currently lives in his native state of Virginia.

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