Lawrence O'Donnell: Reporters must ask Trump 'what good things did Hitler do?' - The Last Word - MSNBC

[Rhiannon12866]

Donald Trump condemned his former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly for quoting Trump’s praise of Adolf Hitler and Hitler’s generals. However, in his response, Trump did not condemn Hitler because, “the only presidential nominee of a major party in history who has admired Adolf Hitler,” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell says, “fears losing a single vote from a single degenerate American Nazi.” - Aired on 10/23/2024.

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1. The only "good thing" Hitler did

was after the great depression hit America and the world, Hitler followed FDR in creating a number of public works projects and hiring many out of work Germans ( but not Jews or minorities ). He hired them to build the autobahn ( and electric dams, etc ). He built the autobahn so that his military ( which was also rebuilding ) would have a method of movement inside Germany so it could move from frontier to frontier much more efficiently. It worked so well that one general Dwight Eisenhower would copy the idea in the 1950s after he became President and leave us with the Interstate highway system. Which got funding from congress because it, too, could be used by the military.

Eisenhower Presidential Library:
The interstate system was initially designed to serve three main purposes: to connect the principal metropolitan areas, cities, and industrial centers; to serve the national defense; and to connect at suitable border points with routes in Canada and Mexico.

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2. Trump might fear losing the votes of American Nazis,

but apparently does not worry about losing the votes of American Jews?

Or, what about Polish Americans? Thousands of Poles who were not Jewish died in concentration camps. So did Roma people. What about people with physical or developmental disabilities and their families? How favorably can they look on someone who admires and wants to emulate Hitler?

We saw what Trump did to migrants and asylum seekers at the southern border. How can anyone doubt that he would do the same to other groups of people?

[Rhiannon12866]

3. My maternal grandparents emigrated from Poland as young people, met and married here

I never met my grandfather, he died when my mother was in college, but I certainly knew my grandmother and she was a very kind person, but the one thing she hated was Russia. She fled Russian-occupied Poland. And my grandparents did well here, their first jobs were in factories, but they eventually owned and ran a neighborhood grocery, my mother said that my grandfather kept his neighbors/customers fed during WWII rationing. They had two daughters who both graduated from college. My mother was the eldest and she said that her father cried when she earned a full scholarship.

And I was told that my grandmother's first vote as a citizen was for LBJ. I can still remember the classic portrait of JFK framed on the wall of her living room. And I also remember her preparing packages to send to her family in Poland, she sent them food, clothes and what money she could for the rest of her life. I always thought it was said that she never went back.

I heard on MSNBC tonight that TFG has a new scapegoat - he said that the Congo is "emptying out their prisons and mental institutions" and sending them here. But this was investigated and Congo officials said that none of this is true.

[wnylib]

4. My paternal grandmother died when I was just a year and a half old

so I don't have any personal memories of her. My grandfather dated one woman when I was about 5 years old that I vaguely remember. Her name was Olga and she was Russian American.

When I was around 7 or 8, grandpa met a woman who became his significant other for many years, although they never married. On the surface, they were opposites. He was a farmer and country guy through and through, of mixed German Swiss and Native American ancestry, raised as a Lutheran. She was a city woman whose parents were Polish immigrants and Jewish. Her parents had left Poland just before the Nazi era in Germany. She grew up with no living aunts, uncles, or cousins. They had all died in the Holocaust.

My mother's parents came to the US as very young children from the German Empire in 1888 and 1890. Her mother's family settled in Erie, PA and her father's family went to Buffalo. They met when he was doing an apprenticeship in Erie.

My mother's maternal family maintained correspondence with relatives in Germany until the First World War. Her mother's sister, my great aunt Emma, lived with us after her husband died.

I was 11, in 6th grade, when Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel was televised. We went to a neighborhood public school and came home at noon for lunch. My mother and Aunt Emma were watching the trial intently when I got home. I stood in the living room doorway to see what it was about until they noticed me. They said it was not fit for children to see and sent me to the kitchen to eat.

I remember 2 things from that day. One was seeing Eichmann enclosed in bullet proof glass. The other was Aunt Emma crying over what her native homeland had become under Nazi rule.

[Rhiannon12866]

5. Thank you for sharing, and that's the thing, our grandparents or great grandparents came here for a reason

And they did find a better life. My Dad's paternal grandparents came here from Ireland. And my paternal grandmother's family were Dutch, came to these shores in the 1600s. All of us, even TFG, came from immigrants, otherwise we wouldn't be here today. So his obsession with immigrants is completely deranged. My mother's Polish parents came through Ellis Island - the Statue of Liberty was placed there for a reason - and they did find a better life. And they've passed it on. Now TFG wants to force his personal prejudices on this country which has always welcomed immigrants. If anyone should be deported, it should be him - would his current wife go with him if he left??

[wnylib]

6. Interesting that your Dutch ancestors were here

in the 1600s. The Dutch side of your family must have stayed in eastern NY for all the generations since then. A lot of colonial New Yorkers and New Englanders moved west, across the mountains into western NY and on to northwestern PA and then to Ohio and beyond after the Revolution. Several had land grants in NY for their service in the Revolution.

My paternal grandmother, who died when I was a year and a half old, was mixed Native American and British. Her British ancestry goes back to the 1600s at John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony. Since they were Puritans, I guess you could say that they came here for a more perfect religious life which to them was a better life. Not so much for the Native population, but even the colonists were welcomed by the Native people, at least when they first arrived.

One side of my paternal grandfather's family was from the Albany area and supposedly descended from colonists, but we've only traced them to the mid 1800s. They had a common name that could have been English or Anglicized Dutch. Too common to trace through records without knowing more about them.

One reason why I've been sympathetic to and interested in the asylum seekers that Trump bashes is that the paternal side of my mother's German family arrived here as political refugees. So they were seeking a safer life, not better materially since they had it pretty good in Germany until they were persecuted for their liberal politics. (Liberalism is in my blood, I guess.)

It happened long before Hitler and the Nazis. My great-grandfather had been a German military officer who loyally supported the liberal plans of the ruling Kaiser to establish a parliamentarian government in Germany like the British system. But that Kaiser died and the new Kaiser strongly opposed the idea of parliamentarian government. He falsely accused its supporters of treason and started arresting them. My great-grandfather's friends helped him escape with his wife and children before they could be arrested.

So, since they were German, would Trump have approved asylum for my great-grandparents if he had been president back then? Or, would he have refused them because they had criminal charges against them in their homeland?

But Trump's claim that migrants and asylum seekers are criminals is based on racism, not on facts. So he might have let my ancestors in since they came from the supposedly right kind of country in Trump's distorted mind.

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Good points and questions, my Dutch ancestors remained in the Albany area (where I was born)

I know the history since my grandmother's aunt commissioned a book which traces the family from the time they arrived on these shores through the 1960s.