Maddow compares Trump to 1940s senator with Nazi ties who demanded allies 'say thank you'

MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow drew a direct comparison between a 1940s Minnesota senator who was secretly on Adolf Hitler's payroll and pushing pro-Nazi policies to the MAGA embrace of pro-Russia policies.

Maddow began her eponymous show Monday night with a history lesson, noting that shortly after President Franklin D. Roosevelt urged lawmakers to push back against a surging Nazi Germany with $7 billion, Sen. Ernest Lundeen gave a "national speech on the radio in which he demanded that England should say thank you to us."

"They should be way more grateful. They should show us some respect. Frankly all our allies should for all we've done for them," Maddow said, paraphrasing Lundeen's speech. "And it was time frankly for them to start paying us back."

ALSO READ:'Absolutely unconscionable': Ex-Republican demands Trump removed from office after fight

Lundeen later created a committee dedicated to having European allies pay back war debts, she noted, which argued the U.S. shouldn't help allies at all because "they owed us money from the first World War."

"I mean, who cares that they're being invaded and attacked by the huge Nazi war machine which has already invaded and taken over the whole rest of Western Europe? Not our problem. We should be collecting right now on what they owe us for helping them already the first time around. In no way should we be giving them any more help," she said, mocking Lundeen.

Lundeen formed a second committee focused on how Europe should pay their debts — including giving America their islands.

"Our allies are in the middle of being invaded and bombed and occupied by the Nazis. But this seems like a good moment to see if we can get some stuff off of them," said Maddow, again mocking Lundeen.

Two weeks after giving a speech on the radio advocating for possibly seizing European allies, Lundeen died in a mysterious plane crash with a piece of paper in his jacket in which he had a speech drafted that urged lawmakers not to support allies fighting Hitler, and asking "what's so bad about Germany anyway?"

"Turns out that speech was written for him by the Nazi government. By a Nazi agent. By the Hitler government's top paid propaganda agent in the United States. Turns out that Sen. Ernest Lundeen was being paid by the Nazis. He had been on Hitler's payroll the whole time. Hitler's government was paying him to argue in Washington, to use his position as a U.S. senator, to make this case to the American people, that we shouldn't be helping our allies fight back against the Nazis in Europe. We should instead focus on getting them to apologize to us for not being able to pay back everything we did for them in the first World War. We should be getting them to show their gratitude to us now by figuring by figuring out what they can do, what they can give up of their own resources to prioritize paying us while they're fighting off the Nazis or whatever."

Maddow played a clip of a Fox News reporter telling viewers any minerals deal won't happen unless Volodymyr Zelensky apologizes on camera, clearly drawing a comparison between the Trump administration's handling of the Ukraine invasion. She noted that while America didn't follow that course in the 1940s, now, it's 85 years later.

And America is six weeks into the second Trump administration.

"Ukraine doesn't have any islands to give up to us. But they do have minerals, I guess? That we could take off them, that we could mine. And so under Donald Trump, our offer to our ally Ukraine — as they try to fight off an invasion from Russia — our offer to them is that they should be so lucky that we would deign to take all of their minerals. They'd be lucky to get such a deal with us. In fact, they'll only even get that deal — they'll only get the privilege of us taking their resources off of them — if they grovel for it."

"But even then, maybe not," Maddow concluded.

Watch the clip below or at this link.