The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) on Wednesday condemned President-elect Donald Trump for invoking Nazi Germany in his criticism of the U.S. intelligence community, arguing his comments trivialize the Holocaust.
“The President-elect’s use of Nazi Germany to make a political analogy is not only an inappropriate comparison on the merits, but it also coarsens our discourse and diminishes the horror of the Holocaust,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement Wednesday.
“ADL always has maintained that glib comparisons to Nazi Germany are offensive and a trivialization of the Holocaust,” he said. “It would be helpful for the president-elect to explain his intentions or apologize for the remark.”
Trump initially made the comparison Wednesday morning on Twitter, apparently enraged by news reports that intelligence officials briefed him on an unverified dossier claiming the Russians had collected salacious information on him.
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public,” he tweeted. “One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?”
{mosads}Trump repeated the comparison later in the day at his first press conference since winning the election in November.
“I think it’s a disgrace, and I say that […] and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do,” Trump said, accusing U.S. intelligence agencies of leaking the dossier.
“I think it’s a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public.”
Greenblatt urged the president-elect to apologize for his comments on Nazi Germany or explain why he made the comparison in the first place.