Donald Trump Jr. lashed out at anyone who would compare his father to Adolf Hitler as he appeared on a CNN special after Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
He forgot one thing: that the man he was supposed to be stumping for, Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance, once did exactly that.
“The media has radicalized the people that are trying to kill my father,” said Don Jr., referring to the two failed assassination attempts on the former president’s life since July. “I’ve had to deal with that twice now in the last two months. I’ve had to have that conversation with my five young children twice in the last two months about someone trying to shoot their grandfather.”
Don Jr. went on to claim the environment that led to the assassination attempts “didn’t just magically happen,” blaming the media for creating a “fake Russia scenario.” (Trumpworld did have many genuine Russian ties including Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who was convicted of fraud as part of Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and later pardoned by his former boss. U.S. officials also concluded that the Kremlin did interfere in the 2016 election, although no direct back channel between Trump and President Putin was uncovered.)
CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins responded to Don Jr., asserting that no one—including the press—wants harm to come to his father. “Everyone wants your dad to be safe,” she said. “No one wants the threats against his life to happen. You can’t blame the media for those threats, there’s been no evidence that that’s what drove those.”
“When someone allows people to have a platform to call someone literally Hitler every day for nine years, it creates it,” replied Don Jr., alluding to instances where media and Democrats have compared his father to the Nazi dictator who oversaw the murder of six million Jews. (Trump himself, who once dined with white supremacist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and is also guilty of comparing opponents to Nazis, denied allegations he once praised Hitler).
Collins then noted that among those who have made the comparison is Vance himself: “But as you know, JD Vance once likened your dad to Hitler as well. He questioned if he was America’s Hitler.”
Vance indeed wondered in private messages in 2016 whether Trump was “America’s Hitler.” During the debate, the GOP nominee’s running mate reiterated that he was wrong to say so, and blamed the media for his previous skepticism of Trump.
“I’ve been open about the fact that I was wrong about Donald Trump,” Vance said. “I was wrong, first of all, because I believed some of the media stories that turned out to be dishonest fabrications of his record.”
