The Washington Post editorial board has found another reason to draw lines connecting President Trump to Nazi Germany.
In an editorial published Monday night, the Post hit the White House for its statement last week on Holocaust Remembrance Day because it didn’t specifically mention Jews.
Suggesting there was something “sinister” about the omission, the Post said the Trump administration enagaged in “soft-core Holocaust denial,” a term coined by historian Deborah Lipstadt.
“The Nazis perpetrated a staggering number of unspeakable crimes — routine murders; human “medical” experimentation; mass rape — and Hitler’s victims were legion,” said the Post. “Yet the Holocaust was a unique crime undertaken on a vast scale, impelled by a focused, sustained hatred, specifically of Jews. That hatred, and that crime, must not be conflated with all Nazi hatreds and all crimes, nor gauzily recalled as one of many such atrocities, nor reimagined as a worn-out grievance.”
The White House insisted that omitting any specific reference to Jews was merely a way to be more “inclusive” of all the victims of the Holocaust. And on Monday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said an aide who worked on the statement is Jewish.
It was reported that the aide was Boris Epshteyn, a Russian-Jewish immigrant and descendant of Holocaust survivors.
The actual White House statement honored “the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust.”
This is not the first time the Post has tied Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Last year, during the heat of the Republican primary, the Post warned voters that Trump could be another Hitler. “You don’t have to go back to history’s most famous example, Adolf Hitler,” the paper said, “to understand that authoritarian rulers can achieve power through the ballot box.”
Trump’s daughter Ivanka is a convert to Judaism and her husband Jared Kushner is also an American Jew and descedent of Holocaust survivors.
