Cornel West believes President Donald Trump is becoming the “American version of a Hitler and a Mussolini” after Trump told members of the “Squad” to go back to their countries of origin even though three of them were born in the United States.
West called Trump a “fascist Frankenstein” and said this is a “very historic and pivotal moment in the history of this nation” because “this democratic experiment” could “come to an end.”
“We have to be clear, though. This is not just a matter of Trump as racist, and I was sad to see the Democratic Party couldn’t just call him a racist but say his words are racist. This is weak for me, but Donald Trump, brother Trump is at this moment becoming the American version of a Hitler and a Mussolini,” West told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Friday evening. “Republicans, across the board, they have adjusted themselves to a profoundly unjust, proto-fascist way of being in the world in terms of being lawless, hiding and concealing, rationalizing this kind of unadulterated raw hatred.”
Trump’s late mother reportedly asked one of his ex-wives, “What sort of son have I created?”
“And we have to answer that question,” West declared. “Is it the case the son she created becomes the American version of Hitler and Mussolini in the White House? In the Oval Office? That’s the question.”
West said the country has had presidents who were slave holders, defenders of “American barbarism, called Jim Crow,” and were “misogynists and homophobes and transphobes.”
But he said “fascism is something else” because “fascism distracts the people, manipulates their emotions, gives them a sense of being a pure community that’s threatened by the impure, and he becomes the very agent that provides the rescue for those based on that fear.”
“Every despot manipulates fear and lies so that criminality and mendacity go hand and hand, to hide and conceal social structures that are generating more misery, more suffering,” West said.
He then ripped liberals for their “self-righteousness” and patting themselves on the back for calling Trump a “racist” and challenged them to do more to oust Trump and “generate action.”
“Oh, I called him a racist. I’m so courageous. No, it don’t take too much courage to call somebody a racist. The question is, what are you going to do to generate action? Don’t just articulate a view that becomes part of the in crowd. We need more than just liberal self-righteousness,” West said. “Donald Trump is as American as apple pie just like Martin Luther King Jr. is as American as apple pie. And the question is, what apple pie is going to win?”