Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe tweeted on Monday that while he doesn’t believe President Donald Trump is “becoming” Adolf Hitler, he does believe that the two men have relevant “physical and behavioral resemblances.”
“Horrifying. I’m not saying Trump is becoming Hitler, so don’t bother tweeting the distinctions. But the physical and behavioral resemblances aren’t altogether irrelevant,” tweeted the Harvard professor, “No prior president even suggests the comparison.”
Professor Tribe’s tweet had been in response to another user, @wvjoe911, who tweeted an image displaying the president and Hitler side-by-side, attempting to compare the two by showing them making similar hand gestures, as well as a quote by French philosopher Voltaire, which read, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
The professor has since deleted his tweet.
Tribe, however, is no stranger to far-left rhetoric. In 2018, the professor told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that “if you’re going to shoot him, you have to shoot to kill,” referring to impeaching the president over the allegations made during the Russia conspiracy hoax, which had been promoted by an uncritical mainstream press.
“If Donald Trump uses the powers of the United States government to cover-up his own criminality or to cover-up the way in which he cooperated with Moscow in order to win the presidency, that may or may not qualify as an ordinary federal crime, but it’s certainly an impeachable offense,” added Tribe, promulgating the wild conspiracy theory.
While the professor does not appear to have apologized for his part in advancing the hoax’s narrative, he did, however, later apologize for likening the president’s impeachment to shooting him.
“In an otherwise good interview I made a terrible word choice, saying an impeachment ‘bullet’ can only be ‘shot once’ so one must ‘shoot to kill,'” tweeted the professor after his CNN interview, “I wasn’t speaking literally, but as one who works hard to reduce gun violence this was just inexcusable. I’m very sorry.”
Professor Tribe has also taught a course at Harvard, entitled, “Constitutional Law 3.0: The Trump Trajectory,” which focused on Trump’s impeachment, seeking to examine “how we might expect the Constitution to constrain Trump’s execution of his powers and duties, and what #impeachment and removal by other means might resemble in the Trump era.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Twitter at @ARmastrangelo and on Instagram.