CNN analyst Sam Vinograd compared President Donald Trump’s 2019 CPAC speech on Saturday to Adolf Hitler murdering six million Jews in the Holocaust.
“The men and women here today are on the front lines of protecting America’s interests, defending America’s value, and reclaiming our nation’s priceless heritage,” Trump said on Saturday. “With your help, we are reversing decades of blunders and betrayals. These are serious, serious betrayals to our nation and to everything we stand for. It’s been done by the failed ruling class that enriched foreign countries at our expense. It wasn’t America first, in many cases it was America last. Those days are over, long over.”
After CNN replayed the clip from Trump’s CPAC speech, Vinograd, a former Obama official, said: “His statement makes me sick, on a personal level, preserving your heritage, reclaiming our heritage, that sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about six million other Jews in the 1940s.”
Vinograd then stated that Trump “pretends that there are massive flows of illegal immigrants coming over our borders,” ignoring the over 360,000 arrests that were made on the border last year.
Then, without any evidence, Vinograd suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin was somehow behind Trump’s CPAC speech.
“By the way, this whole CPAC speech, how many pieces, parts of President Putin’s to-do list was President Trump trying to accomplish today?” Vinograd continued. “He denigrated our institutions – the Department of Justice and U.S. Congress, he spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, he undermined the credibility of several of our institutions – he sowed divisions, he sowed confusion, he was speaking to his base but he was also saying things that really looked like Vladimir Putin scripted his speech. So it helped him perhaps with his base, and politically, while at the same time, making Russia’s job a lot easier.”
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Not surprisingly, Trump blasted the media during his speech, which lasted approximately two hours.
“I’ve learned because with the fake news — if you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience, if you’re on live television with millions of people and 25,000 people, in an arena and if you say something like Russia please, if you can, it is Hillary Clinton’s e-mails! Please, Russia, please!” Trump joked at CPAC. “Please, get us the e-mails! Please!”
“So everyone is having a good time, I’m laughing, we’re having fun and then that fake CNN and others say, ‘he asked Russia to go get the e-mails. Horrible!'” Trump continued. “I mean, I saw it like two weeks ago. I’m watching and they are talking about one of points. He asked Russia for the e-mails. These people are sick and I’m telling you — they know the game. They know the game and they play it dirty. Dirtier than anyone who’s played the game. Dirtier than it’s ever been played.”
Also not surprisingly, Vinograd took issue with Trump’s joke, complaining on Twitter: “Hey legal eagles – is saying you were ‘joking’ about asking someone to commit a crime a reasonable defense? Trump just told #CPAC that he was ‘joking’ about asking Russia to hack HRC Apparently Stone didn’t think he was joking… nor the campaign officials that coordinated w him.”