Hillary Clinton’s Nazi-Rally Rhetoric Is ‘Insulting’ and ‘Disrespectful,’ Republicans Say

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is likening former President Donald Trump’s upcoming weekend campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in New York to an infamous February 1939 Nazi rally held in a previous New York City arena bearing the same name, but Republican leaders are firing back, calling the comparison “disrespectful” and “insulting.” 

Trump is set to hold his rally on Sunday in the home of the NBA’s New York Knicks and NHL’s New York Rangers with a seating capacity of about 18,500 people. 

On Thursday, Clinton told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that comments by Vice President Kamala Harris and former Trump Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly calling Trump a “fascist” were necessary to sound the alarm regarding a potential second Trump presidency. 

“But please open your eyes to the danger that this man poses to our country, because I think it is clear and present for anybody paying attention,” said Clinton, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump.

Clinton did not mention that the 1992 Democratic National Convention, at which her husband, Bill Clinton, won the party’s nomination for president, was held at the current Madison Square Garden, which opened in 1968.  

On Fox Business on Friday morning, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Elizabeth Pipko said she “knows fascism all too well.” Pipko, 29, is Jewish and a first-generation American whose parents emigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union.  

“I think it’s an embarrassing attempt to try to sway the momentum to her [Harris] when we know the American people know better, and she knows better,” Pipko said. “But it’s also so disrespectful, so insulting to so many of us. We know what happened on July 13. We know that this rhetoric can be so dangerous.” Trump was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin that day in Butler, Pennsylvania. 

Pipko said that antisemitism is rising in the U.S. and around the world, “especially in this last year under Kamala Harris and [President] Joe Biden. So, to say something like this, knowing that fact, knowing she’s responsible for that, is incredibly disrespectful.” 

In the three-month period following the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, U.S. antisemitic incidents increased by 361% compared with the same period one year earlier, according to a press release from the Anti-Defamation League. 

If Harris wants the American people to entrust her with executive authority, then she must abandon the rhetoric that “endangers both American lives and institutions,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a joint statement released Friday.  

“The Vice President’s words more closely resemble those of President Trump’s second would-be assassin than her own earlier appeal to civility,” the statement said. “The man who was caught waiting in ambush in Florida left others with a chilling call to arms: ‘It is up to you now to finish the job.’ Labeling a political opponent as a ‘fascist,’ risks inviting yet another would-be assassin to try robbing voters of their choice before Election Day.” 

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