Eugene Robinson: It’s ‘Necessary and Inevitable to Compare [MSG] Rally to the Nazi Rally’

SCARBOROUGH: “I mean, my God. I mean, look at Donald Trump and his own family. I don’t say this negatively. I mean, he’s married to an immigrant. His first wife was an immigrant. His children, I think four of his five children are children of immigrants. His mother was an immigrant with, I believe, many, many siblings. I mean, this is the American dream. The American dream. As Ronald Reagan said, and I know Ronald Reagan, I guess, is out of vogue — the very people that worked for him, a lot of them are endorsing Donald Trump, but others just try to turn a blind eye to the fact that Ronald Reagan chose, just as Ike chose to warn America against the growing military industrial complex, Ronald Reagan used his farewell speech to warn about what would happen if we close the doors of this great country to immigrants. He said, we would grow old, we would grow weary, we would lose our competitive advantage. Immigrants keep us forever young. Ronald Reagan’s words, not mine. Ronald Reagan’s words, not mine. You know, Gene, to tell you how callous things have become, we talk about the firehose of falsehoods, well, let’s just talk about the firehose of bigotry. We have been talking about the Trump rally calling Puerto Ricans garbage and how insulting that’s been. But there were so many insults, we haven’t even gotten to the part where the speaker saw a black man in the audience and made a watermelon joke. That — usually, in the old times, that would stop the rally, people would go out and say, ‘You need to get off the stage.’ They would apologize a hundred times over. Just don’t. And then they pretend they didn’t hear the joke when you know they did.”
Robinson: “Yeah, they get deaf, don’t they? They get selectively deaf. They didn’t hear what was said for six hours at that rally. It was — what an amazing and frightening and awful spectacle that was. Of course, the comic was terrible, but, as Claire said, the whole thing, the vice president of the United States was called the Antichrist, another speaker said that Democrats needed to be slaughtered. It was absolutely beyond the pale. Yet, that’s where we are now. So it is not only justified, but necessary and inevitable to compare that rally to the Nazi rally that was held there before World War II. That should never be appropriate or necessary in American politics, and yet it is. It is. This is where Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have brought us. They brought us to this terrible place where — and now are seeking license to take us even further into this dark realm for four more years. It’s frightening. It should be frightening to anyone who loves this country and the essence and idea of this country.”