Bill Maher and Megyn Kelly invoked Adolf Hitler and other dictators while arguing over whether Donald Trump was a threat to democracy.
The pair were discussing the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Maher’s show when it went off the rails and four other countries plus Nazi Germany were swept up.
Maher was the first to demonstrate Godwin’s Law when he began to compare the current geopolitical situation with the Axis situation against the Allies of the 1930s.
‘We thought that when the war in Ukraine started, Putin would be isolated. It’s not isolated,” Maher began.
‘You had the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and now four or five other countries – representing about half the world’s population, about 35 per cent of GDP.
Bill Maher compared the pre-World War II Axis powers of the 1930s to Russia, China and their “dictator” allies in the present, and warned that the United States under Donald Trump could choose the wrong side.
‘These are dictator countries. There is a very World War II-like feeling here, when dictator countries are coming together.
‘In World War II, what did Hitler and the Japanese have in common? Nothing! Except they saw the world one way: fascism.
Brazil was a military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, then returned to democracy until the presidency of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
He was defeated by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the 2022 elections, but alleged electoral fraud, his supporters stormed parliament, and he allegedly planned a self-coup to stay in power, but was unsuccessful.
India is a functioning democracy, but its democratic institutions have eroded over the past decade since Narendra Modi became prime minister.
“Through its control of the media, monopolization of campaign finance, and harassment of its opponents, India appears poised to become an illiberal pseudo-democracy akin to Turkey or Russia,” Chatham House wrote last year. .
“Opponents and critical journalists have been harassed, persecuted, investigated for fiscal irregularities or placed under surveillance, which has restricted critical voices.”
China is a one-party dictatorship and South Africa has strong democratic institutions, a free press and an independent judiciary, but it is plagued by corruption and political violence remains stubbornly persistent.
The BRICS also include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, all of which are seriously flawed dictatorships or democracies.
Kelly responded that Trump did not start any war or involve the United States in any new conflict when he was president and expected the same in his second act.
Despite erroneous claims about “dictatorship,” Maher continued his comparison of the BRICS to the Axis and warned that the United States could be next.
‘Somehow the world seems to be dividing between the ‘good’ countries – the democratic countries – and these autocracies. And if your man comes in, we’ll be on the wrong side of this,’ he said.
Kelly responded that Trump did not start any war or involve the United States in any new conflict when he was president and expected the same in his second act.
‘Putin did not invade Ukraine until Biden took power. We had the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, which projected weakness in the world,” he said.
‘People understood that we were weakened and that was what was provocative. Weakness is provocative.”
Trump, as president, negotiated the US withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban, allowing the terrorist group to retake the country, but troops were not scheduled to leave until after his term ended in 2021.
‘Trump destabilized these people. They didn’t know what to expect from him. Next thing you know, he’s bombing Soleimani,” Kelly continued.
“Trump carried out strategic attacks that had people on his tail, who didn’t know what he could do to them.”
Bill Maher and Megyn Kelly invoked Adolf Hitler and other dictators while arguing over whether Donald Trump was a threat to democracy.
Maher said he was less worried about that and more about “what it could do to us” in domestic affairs if he were elected again.
Kelly responded: ‘We’ve had four years of Trump. Trump didn’t go after his political enemies in the Justice Department, that was Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.’
President Joe Biden did not initiate any of the many legal proceedings against Trump. They were presented by state and local authorities and there is no evidence of collusion between them and the White House.
Maher made another comparison to Hitler, noting that the Nazi dictator did not introduce his most reprehensible and autocratic policies until years after he had assumed power.
‘Well, we had Hitler in the ’30s and things were good, and then we had Hitler in the ’40s and they got a lot worse. Just because we had it…’ he said, before Kelly interrupted him.
‘Did he hide his Hitlerism for the first four years and is it going to come out in full force in the second term?’ he said, in rhetorical reference to Trump.
Maher responded: “Well, he tried to do things like that, he tried to do dictatorial, fascist things and they stopped him.”
Kelly then repeated his baseless claim that Biden and Kamala Harris ‘unleashed this Department of Justice against their political enemy Donald Trump, his number one primary rival for the presidency.’
Maher’s studio audience laughed at her statement and she lashed out: ‘Is this funny? Because they did it. If you want to talk about fascism, that’s fascist.
Once the audience calmed down, Maher closed the topic by saying, “I think history will not be kind to your point of view.”
John Kelly (R), Donald Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, rejects claims that the former president was a fan of Adolf Hitler and warns that he would “rule like a dictator if allowed.” Kelly and Trump appear together in June 2018.
Gen. John Kelly, who was White House chief of staff for 18 months, this week called his former boss the “definition of a fascist.”
he stated Trump once said that “Hitler did some good things” and praised the Nazi dictator for having “rebuilt the economy.”
Kelly also said The Atlantic Tuesday that Trump said he wanted his staff to be more like “German generals in Second World War‘ because they were ‘totally loyal’ to Hitler.
He stated that Trump “certainly prefers the dictator approach to government” and “never accepted the fact that he was not the most powerful man in the world.”
Reading aloud a definition of fascism from a textbook during an audio interview with the New York Times, he compared Trump’s worldview.
He described the ideology as a “far-right authoritarian and ultranationalist political ideology and movement characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forced repression of opposition, and belief in a natural social hierarchy.”
Kelly said that in “my experience” he found that Trump believed those ideologies “would work better in terms of governing the United States.”
Trump and Kelly together in October 2017 during a briefing with senior military leaders in the Cabinet Room of the White House.
He also claimed that Trump was upset by the limitations on his power and wanted the “ability to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted,” which Kelly said was Trump’s experience in the business world.
In a separate interview with The Atlantic, Kelly claimed that Trump became more interested in the “advantages of dictatorship” and having “absolute control over the military” as his tenure in the Oval Office neared its end.
‘I need the kind of generals Hitler had. “People who were totally loyal to him, who follow orders,” Trump said during a private conversation at the White House.
The Trump campaign responded to Kelly’s claims in a statement to the NYT, saying the former political adviser “has been totally delusional with these debunked stories he has fabricated.”
He also denied the conversation Kelly recounted to The Atlantic, saying, “This is absolutely false.” “President Trump never said this.”
