MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade drew parallels between Donald Trump’s messaging tactics and those used historically by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
She argued their strategies have not changed much, even if delivery mechanisms have, with Trump employing simple repeatable slogans like “Stop the Steal” through social media and cable news.
“If you look at history, what Mussolini and Hitler did, their tactics really haven’t changed,” McQuade began.
McQuade noted Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf about telling a big lie that something so significant was stolen or interfered with, making the sheer audacity and scale of the lie more believable.
“Maybe the delivery mechanism has changed a little bit with social media, cable television but the messages are very similar to the ones that we saw Hitler and Mussolini use very simple messages. Repeatable little slogans like ‘Stop the Steal.’ What Hitler wrote about in Mein Kampf make the lie big. Everybody tells a little lies, but they don’t have the audacity to tell a lie big about something so significant. The fact that the Trump has told the lie about a stolen election is so big ironically it becomes more believable the bigger it is. Those tactics have been documented throughout history,” she continued.
The added that people now self-select into ideological news “bubbles” through social media and partisan outlets, hearing only repeated redirection claims instead of a diversity of information, as seen with some believing Trump’s claims of election interference against him.
McQuade said, “We’ve assorted ourselves into news bubbles where we listen to one side of information or another and social media. You heard that woman say all my friends voted for Donald Trump. I’m sure she is in a Facebook group with a group of people and perhaps she watches Fox News. So all she ever hears is the repeat of these ideas of redirection, that the investigations against Donald Trump are voter interference. And so she lives in that echo-sphere.”
