Trump 'tripling down on fascist rhetoric' while denying he's a Hitler fan: Morning Joe
Adolph Hitler, Donald Trump (Hitler via archives/Trump via AFP)

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough called out Donald Trump's denials of having read Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" as hollow and false.

The former president claimed during an Iowa campaign speech that he's never read the Nazi leader's manifesto, a denial that was apparently necessitated by criticism of his recent authoritarian musings and his use of fascist language to disparage immigrants and political rivals, but the "Morning Joe" host wasn't buying it.

"I have always found it just surprising whenever you bring up comparisons with what Donald Trump said and what fascist leaders in the past have said, everybody with their white gloves trying to play by a different set of rules, saying you can't talk about that, you can't bring up the fact that Donald Trump talks like a fascist or Mussolini or Hitler," Scarborough said. "When you go back and see what Hitler said about vermin and need to destroy vermin or what Hitler said about poisoning the blood of our country. The comparisons are – the parallels are shocking."

"They are just shocking," he added, "and by the way, when a guy says, 'I have never read that,' it brings me back and a lot of people back to Ivana Trump's interview with Vanity Fair, where she said that her husband kept collected speeches of Adolf Hitler by his bedside. That's an awfully random thing to say. You'd say, Joe will keep sometimes devotional biographies of Paul McCartney, Churchill books, randomly, Donald Trump kept a collection of Hitler speeches by his bedside, and so maybe he did read it, but he kept a collection of Hitler speeches by his bed, according to to his first wife. You can hear it in his words, you can see it at his rallies. That's exactly the direction he's going. He's doubling, tripling down on fascist Hitler-like rhetoric."

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