Actor Robert De Niro said Thursday on MSNBC’s “The 11th Hour” that former President Donald Trump’s rise was like that of Adolf Hitler’s in 1930s Germany.

De Niro said, “He is sick, he is genuinely a sick person that somehow has been allowed into our system. I’m not calling him names, he just can’t be anywhere near the office of the presidency.”

He continued, “I don’t understand it. I don’t I don’t think they understand how dangerous it will be if he ever, God forbid, becomes president. I don’t think they really understand. And historically, from what I see, even in Nazi Germany, they had it with Hitler. They don’t take him seriously. He looks like a clown. Acts like a clown. Mussolini. Same thing. These guys, I don’t know why they look like clowns. They somehow people, that element of society identifies in some ways with them. But it would be chaos beyond our imagination. There’s no mystery about him. He’s right out front. And what he says is what it’ll be if he becomes president.”

He added, “The guy is a monster. It’s beyond wrong. It’s almost like he wants to do the most horrible things he can think of to get a rise out of us. I don’t know what it is.”

De Niro concluded, “We always hear about people from Eastern Europe, the Jews from other parts of Eastern Europe, from Western Europe coming over. Look what happened with France, and with the Nazis and so on. And they come over and you hear these, and they go, and when I was a kid, they’d say, ‘You don’t really appreciate this country, you know, what we know from experience.’ Imagine what those people went through. I’m just starting to see it. You know, as a kid, I said ‘Hitler, it’s a nightmare that never would happen.’ But now I see that it’s possible. But those people, sometimes I run into some people who are close to my age, who are from Eastern Europe, European countries or even Nazi Germany and, you know, you understand it.”

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