Washington, DC. The US President’s official spokesperson stepped directly off the side of a historical cliff, comparing the act’s of Syria’s President Assad’s use of gas with Adolf Hitler’s use of Zyklon-B to kill millions of Jews during the Second World War.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has faced calls to resign, after a series of moronic statements calling the Assad regime worse than Hitler. Donald Trump’s spokesman spent the Jewish holiday of Passover clarifying and reclarifying comments after claiming Hitler was not using gas “on his own people the same way” as Assad and referring to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers.”
Reaction and condemnation was nuclear in it’s force, top Democrat Nancy Pelosi said Mr Spicer’s comments reflect poorly on Mr Trump’s judgement. “Either he is speaking for the President, or the President should have known better than to hire him,” she said.
Spicer’s slip up started, “Someone as despicable as Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons. You have to ask yourself if you are Russia, is this a country and a regime you want to align yourself with?” Even at the briefing itself, journalists bristled at the comparison ,Hitler’s Nazi regime used Zyklon B, a gas, to kill millions of Jews in concentration camps during the course of the Second World War.
When one reporter raised the issue to Spicer, he attempted to clarify. Later in the press conference: “When it comes to Sarin gas, Hitler was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing… “He brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. I was saying in the way that Assad used them where he went into town, dropped them into the middle of town.” The clarification sparked outrage, both at the use of the term “his own people'” because Hitler was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of German Jews and other Germans during the Holocaust.
Spicer further opened his neck vein by using the historically illiterate term “Holocaust centers”, which are commonly called concentration camps or death camps. The clarification was also a doubling down on the Hitler comparison in general, something which many people, including political allies, thought was inappropriate.
Even Trump’s most loyal supporters now see Spicer’s position as no longer stable in the Trump Administration following the Holocaust fiasco.