Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders insisted Sunday that he was not trying to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler on Saturday, when he said as a Jewish man, he knows what a “lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred.”
“No, I did not compare Trump to Hitler, but I will do everything that I can to stop this type of hatred and hate talk that we are hearing,” Sanders said Sunday on ABC News.
Sanders brought up Nazi Germany on Saturday, immediately after talking about Trump’s plan to block Muslims from entering the country. His remarks were widely seen as a way to relate Hitler’s actions against Jews to Trump’s plan for Muslims.
“My father came to this country at the age of 17 from Poland,” Sander said Saturday. “He came over, other people in his family did not come over. Those people died. Children died.”
“So that is in my heart, to see what a lunatic can do by stirring up racial hatred,” he added.
But on Sunday, Sanders said he wasn’t trying to compare Trump and Hitler.
“No, that’s not right,” Sanders said. “What I talked about there was a Muslim woman there, next to me, and she is telling me … what is true, is that people in the Muslim community are very fearful now.”
“She was describing a kid who now locks the door at night, and what I was saying is, I’m going to do everything that I can to kind of stop those Islamaphobic attacks, so the kids in this country who happen to be Muslim aren’t afraid.”
