Donald Trump Jr. compares Democratic platform to the Nazis

Impact

Donald Trump Jr. compared the Democratic Party platform to that of the Nazis while hosting the Washington, D.C. premiere of the movie Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party, created by conservative propagandist Dinesh D’Souza, who has long attempted to connect Democrats to the histories of fascism and racism.

“When you look at the movie, you’ll see that there is a very distinct and clear difference between what actually happened and what is being sold to our youth today,” Trump Jr. told One America News Network on Wednesday, the Washington Post reported. “You see the Nazi platform from the early 1930s ... and you look at it, compared to the DNC platform of today, you’re saying, ‘Man, those things are awfully similar’ to a point where it’s actually scary. It’s the exact opposite of what you’ve been told.”

The film from D’Souza — who once pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud and received a pardon from President Donald Trump in May — is based on his book of the same name, which sought to highlight alleged ties between Democrats and the Ku Klux Klan. The film also compares Trump to former President Abraham Lincoln.

D’Souza’s film is reportedly misleading, however, as it leaves out the fact that political party membership changed dramatically during the civil rights era, when Southern Democrats angered by the party’s embrace of the Civil Rights Act defected to the GOP.

D’Souza was recently schooled on these facts by historian Kevin M. Kruse, who posted an epic Twitter thread in July listing many of the prominent Democrats who switched to the Republican Party in protest of the Democrats’ stance on civil rights.

This isn’t the first time D’Souza has made a misleading film. In October, Mic debunked D’Souza’s The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, which had a similar theme to what Trump Jr. claimed about Democrats’ ties to Nazism.