A former Republican congressman who staunchly supported President Donald Trump during the 2016 election said on Monday that he believes the GOP leader is “evil” on par with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer and the Sept. 11th terrorists.
“I don't know that you can call someone worse than to call someone evil,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said on Substack on Monday. “Hitler was evil. Jeffrey Dahmer was evil. Those Islamist terrorists who flew planes into the World Trade Center and tried to fly into the Pentagon — they were evil. That was evil that came to us on 9/11. So I know what I'm saying. I know the gravity of what I'm saying when I say Donald Trump is evil.”
Walsh acknowledged that it would take him too long for a single podcast episode to list all of Trump’s examples of evil but alluded to his violations of human rights while pursuing anti-immigration policies, his assaults on democratic institutions, his open cruelty toward those who disagree with him and his various unprovoked wars.
“Maybe this is why it's so hard for people to wrap their arms around this — because to say that the current president of the United States is an evil human being, our president, of this good, great, decent country, to say that we have someone evil in the White House — that's really shocking,” Walsh said. “That's hard for us to embrace. And when we say that, if we believe that, in essence we're talking about ourselves as well. Not that we're evil, but we've got to take a look at ourselves, because the people of this country put him there.”
Walsh has previously referred to Trump as a “traitorous fascist” who seems to engage in unprovoked foreign wars to distract the public from his cover up of his links to the late child sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.
“Look, this is a ‘Wag the Dog’ situation on steroids,” Walsh said in February, after Trump invaded Venezuela but before he attacked Iran. “He may go to war seven times this year. He’ll do whatever he can,” speculating that the president could even attack Cuba, Denmark and/or North Korea.
“He’s America’s enemy,” Walsh concluded. “He’s attacking our elections. Elections are the heartbeat of our democracy. If you destroy elections in a representative democracy, the democracy dies. So Trump is our enemy.”
In the build-up to America’s invasion of Iran, Walsh juxtaposed Trump’s military belligerence with his promise to keep the United States out of unnecessary wars, claiming those in the MAGA movement who still back Trump are in a “cult.”
“This is what America looks like when one of our two major political parties has become an authoritarian-embracing cult,” Walsh wrote on his Substack at the time. “And I’ll throw in for good measure — hey, MAGA, MAGA — this is what America looks like when the people who voted for Donald Trump don’t get what Donald Trump said he would give them, but they still praise him to the high heavens.”
He later added, “I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world. You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” For them to still support him despite his warmongering means, according to Walsh, that they are in a cult."
“And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters?” Walsh argued. “What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”
Speaking with this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2024, historian of fascism Dr. Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research explained that Trump’s rhetorical violence is something he does "again and again, and that's why he reminds us of [Nazi Germany dictator Adolf] Hitler." He added that Trump "follows Hitler's playbook in projecting onto his enemies all his desires, fantasies, and aspirations. This includes, of course, as he said, 'retribution' and violence."
Trump's National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Salon in response, "It's been less 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler. It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."
