In the least shocking twist of all time, impeachment came up during Friday night’s ABC Democratic presidential debate. The answers were hardly surprising — it’s not as if the candidates really disagree — but one answer from Tom Steyer stood out for being uniquely unhinged. He compared impeaching President Trump and investigating him even after a Democrat takes the White House in 2020 to the prosecution of Nazi war criminals in the decades after the Holocaust.
Did Tom Steyer just compare Trump to a Nazi war criminal? Morally and historically illiterate. #DemDebate
— Eli Lake (@EliLake) February 8, 2020
Unhinged: 2020 Democrat presidential candidate Tom Steyer compares impeachment to prosecuting Nazi war criminalshttps://t.co/aqB9eEKQJL pic.twitter.com/HLAy2zWPPt
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 8, 2020
“My father was one of the people who prosecuted the Nazi war criminals after World War II,” Steyer said when asked about impeachment. “That’s part of the reason I started [supporting impeachment] … because when you see something really wrong in the United States, you’re supposed to stand up against it and fight against it, and that’s what I was doing.”
Let’s be clear: People can disagree about impeachment in good faith. Smart, honest people can fall on either side of this issue. But comparing Trump’s alleged misconduct with how he treated Ukrainian foreign aid to literal Nazi war criminals who wanted to take over the world and eliminate minorities is simply unhinged.
Despite jokes about how he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it, Trump hasn’t killed anyone. He didn’t carry out a genocide. To callously suggest punishing a politician’s arguable abuse of power is akin to prosecuting Nazis is a slap in the face to Holocaust survivors and millions of Jewish lives lost.
This line of attack against Trump is so beyond the realm of sane discourse that Steyer loses standing from his claim to be a serious person, let alone be president.
