MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd likened Republicans to Nazi Germany leadership in a Wednesday appearance on the network.
During a segment on "Deadline: White House," MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace suggested that there is a disconnect between voters who prioritize economic stability and those who will vote to protect the "health of democracy" in the upcoming midterm elections. Wallace's show regularly features Democrats who claim that democracy will be lost if Republicans regain control of Congress in November.
Doubling down on the party's melodramatic rhetoric, Dowd, a failed Democrat candidate, told Wallace that the GOP focus on economic issues and inflation is reminiscent of a "candidate" and "a party" that campaigned on the same issues in Germany in the 1930s. Nazi leader Adolph Hitler ran for president in 1932 before he was appointed chancellor of Germany the following year after a series of electoral victories by the Nazi Party.
"I’ll also remind people of a history lesson that in the 1930s Germany, there was a candidate and there was a party that said they were going to do something about inflation," Dowd said. "And they did something about inflation. Inflation went away but so did the democracy in Germany in the 1930s up until 1945."
Dowd went on to blame the media for failing to properly portray the threats Republicans pose to the democratic system if they emerge victorious next month.
"I think the media has a responsibility in this… there’s too much reporting on something voters are aware of and not on what voters are not aware of, which is the threat to democracy and then what that might mean," Dowd said. "What is the result of that? It’s not only will the economy flourish. It’s will you have any equity in economy? What happens when you lose democracy? The economy becomes the service of the tribe in power, of the people in power… and then you add on to that, you begin to lose freedoms when you lose a democracy."
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Dowd also blamed his own party for misusing funds to drive home empty messaging that doesn't resonate with voters.
"I am afraid not only has the media in some respects not done a good enough job, but the Democrats have had $4 billion – billion with a b – to spend in this election cycle through the candidate expenditures and through their super PACs. Very little has been spent on this particular issue per se. And that, I think, is irresponsible."
Left-leaning media figures have increasingly compared Republicans and Trump supporters to Nazis over the past several years.
In June, former Trump official turned anti-Trump activist Miles Taylor drew comparisons between President Trump and Republicans today to "the rise of Hitler" on Wallace's show.
"The violence here is really, really, the sort of crux of all of it. My friend Alex Vindman always says that there’s so many people that are still silent because the intimidation actually works. And we’ve seen this before in democratic societies, political intimidation leading to political violence, God forbid, leading to political assassinations," Taylor said.
"You know where we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it in the Weimar Republic in Germany, before the rise of Hitler," he continued.
Democratic adviser Kurt Bardella also likened modern-day Republicans to the leadership of Nazi Germany in an August MSNBC appearance.
"We are watching right now a very radical and extreme Republican Party mirror what we have seen in other places like Nazi Germany, like other people like the Bolsheviks," the former adviser to the disgraced Lincoln Project said. "We have seen this playbook before."
