Billionaire entrepreneur and owner of X, Elon Musk, criticized actor Robert De Niro’s recent comparisons of Trump to the 20th Century fascist dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. According to a tweet from Musk, the comments “make no sense.”
De Niro made the controversial remarks during an appearance on MSNBC’s “11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle,” where he disparaged the former Republican president. The famous actor maintained that Trump should not be “anywhere near the office of the presidency.”
However, Musk challenged the idea that Trump resembled a fascist dictator. Citing evidence from Trump’s first term, the Telsa founder stated that Trump’s policies were not even remotely close to those of the Nazis. Furthermore, Musk pointed out the Abraham Accords, questioning how the noble ambition of peace in the Middle East could resemble the goals of Hitler.
“Well, Trump was actually already president for 4 years and his policies bore no resemblance to those of Hitler, so this makes no sense. In fact, with the Abraham Accords, he made some progress towards peace in the Middle East, which was definitely not high on Hitler’s agenda,” Musk shared on X.
The American Tribune reported on De Niro’s wide-ranging statements to MSNBC, which criticized Trump as being everything from a “stupid bully” to a “monster.” He suggested that Trump is similar to Hitler and Mussolini, calling on Americans to vote for President Biden.
“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,” he said.
De Niro claimed another Trump presidency would cause “chaos beyond our imagination.” Furthermore, the actor cited the post-World War II perspective of European Jews who came to America, implying that Americans don’t understand the danger the country faces from Trump’s presidential leadership.
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He stated, “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.’”
The liberal actor suggested that he used to think of Hitler as a “nightmare” that would never return. However, De Niro claimed that through Donald Trump’s aspirations to reclaim the White House, such authoritarian rule could be revived.
De Niro added, “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, they… you understand it.”
Watch De Niro here: