MSNBC is facing backlash for comparing former President Donald Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden event to a pro-Nazi rally held at the same New York City venue in 1939 after splicing in 85-year-old footage of the crowd doing Seig Heil salutes in between clips of the Republican’s Sunday audience.
One of the far-left network’s anchors, Jonathan Capehart, called Trump’s packed rally “chilling” because of the German American Bund’s completely unrelated event at the arena:
“But that jamboree happening right now, you see it there on your screen in that place is particularly chilling because in 1939, more than 20,000 supporters of a different fascist leader, Adolf Hitler, packed the Garden for a so-called pro-America rally,” Capehart said while rolling black-and-white footage of Nazi fans.
Historian and CNN contributor Ruth Ben-Ghiat concurred with Capehart’s comparison, calling the Trump rally an “overt Nazi parallel.”
The segment upset thousands of Trump fans, with several Jewish supporters of the former president saying MSNBC was “mocking the Holocaust and diminishing the memory of the millions of Jews who perished during that period”:
Journalist Yaakov Strasberg wrote on X, “Please explain to all of us Orthodox Jewish Trump supporters (the vast majority of Orthodox Jews) how it’s a ‘Nazi rally'”:
Social media influencer Shane Ginsberg poked fun at the media outlet’s claims, writing, “I’m Jewish. I went to the Nazi rally. I’m voting for Trump. Any questions?”:
Proud “Jewish New York Republican” Debra Lea posted a video to X to set the record straight, calling out the “mainstream media”:
While on the vice presidential campaign trail, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) also compared Trump’s rally to the 1939 Nazi event, telling his supporters in in Las Vegas, Nevada, to “Google” it on Sunday:
Breitbart News fact-checked these desperate “Nazi” comparisons and claims coming out of the Democrat camp, noting that Jewish people have also held anti-Nazi rallies at Madison Square Garden.
The Trump War Room also pointed out that the Democrat National Conventions were held at Madison Square Garden several times throughout the decades: