On Monday, MSNBC host and podcaster Nicolle Wallace welcomed Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker to The Best People for a truly surreal interview. Within the span of only a couple of minutes, Wallace would declare that no Democrat has ever compared President Trump to Adolf Hitler, then claim that if they did, it would be appropriate, and then sit back and listen as Pritzker did precisely that, all while claiming he wasn’t.
Pritzker’s conceit was to say that he wasn’t suggesting that Trump would throw people in death camps, but that what Trump is doing follows a similar authoritarian playbook to one the Nazis used to amass power. With that in mind, Wallace claimed that the Nazi comparisons are completely appropriate:
You put, sort of, the intellectual architecture around something that, I mean, JD Vance called Donald Trump America’s Hitler. It’s not a partisan analysis, right? There is an intrigue there that’s been noted by JD Vance and reported on by journalists, but you’ve put some architecture behind the parallels that involve all of us, and you’ve talked about the first thing you said was people being asked for their papers, American citizens being asked to show up with papers, street vendors being asked to produce passports, rounding people up, and good people looking the other way, thinking, ‘That’s not about me, you know, I’m a citizen,’ but who do they go after next? We talk a little bit about why that’s so uncomfortable for so many people.
Pritzker concurred, “Yeah. I do want to, you know, separate myself from the idea that I’m calling him Hitler—”
Wallace then interrupted him to add, “I don’t think any Democrat has compared Trump to Hitler.” I actually—and I think it’s a smear that they project back onto critics.”
Fact-check: Democrats can’t stop comparing Trump to Hitler and have also compared non-Trump Republicans to Hitler.
Nevertheless, Wallace rolled on, “But I—JD Vance called Donald Trump cultural heroin. He called him America’s Hitler. I mean, the attacks on Donald Trump as a fascist came from three generals who worked for him. I mean, the most brutal critiques have come from people that have seen him far more closely than you or I combined, but I think that gets lumped in with what is a very thoughtful analysis about all of us— at looking the other way has an equally harrowing echo in history.”
Once again, Pritzker agreed and, while insisting he wasn’t playing the Nazi card, invoked Martin Niemoller:
Yeah, I appreciate that and my point, and I think the point you’re making is that, you know, we’ve seen this before with totalitarians and authoritarians. That there’s a well-worn path throughout history, and you can recognize the signs of it, and that it just happens that the authoritarian and totalitarian history that I know best is having built a Holocaust museum, sitting next to those survivors for 10 years doing it, and learning so much about the Holocaust, and my own family’s experience, you know, escaping the Russian killings of Jews in the 19th century in Ukraine. I think it’s easy to recognize this. The question is, are people going to, you know, the, I think we all ought to go reread Martin Niemoller’s poem. ‘First They Came’ is the name of it, and, you know, because it’s right.”
Pritzker added, “I mean, if you can substitute different names in there for, you know, for socialists or Jews or, you know, trade unionists, and it all applies today, you know, it happens that what the Nazis did was they went after immigrants first. Just so happens, you know, and then they, and then they categorized people who were German citizens but weren’t maybe multi-generational German citizens as immigrants after they had demonized immigrants, right? And now you’re put in a demonized category.”
For a duo that is desperately trying to claim no Democrat would ever compare Trump to Hitler, they sure do seem to love a Nazi analogy.
Here is a transcript for the October 27 show:
MSNBC The Best People with Nicolle Wallace
10/27/2025
NICOLLE WALLACE: You put, sort of, the intellectual architecture around something that, I mean, JD Vance called Donald Trump America’s Hitler. It’s not a partisan analysis, right? There is an intrigue there that’s been noted by JD Vance and reported on by journalists, but you’ve put some architecture behind the parallels that involve all of us, and you’ve talked about the first thing you said was people being asked for their papers, American citizens being asked to show up with papers, street vendors being asked to produce passports, rounding people up, and good people looking the other way, thinking, “That’s not about me, you know, I’m a citizen,” but who do they go after next? We talk a little bit about why that’s so uncomfortable for so many people.
JB PRITZKER: Yeah. I do want to, you know, separate myself from the idea that I’m calling him Hitler—
WALLACE: From JD Vance.
PRITZKER: Well, I definitely want to separate myself from him and from, and from the idea that, you know, that I’m not suggesting, I haven’t suggested that Donald Trump is Hitler. I wouldn’t say that—
WALLACE: I don’t think any Democrat has. I actually—and I think it’s a smear—
PRITZKER: Yeah.
WALLACE: — that they project back onto critics. But I—JD Vance called Donald Trump—
PRITZKER: Yes.
WALLACE: — Cultural heroin. He called him America’s Hitler. I mean, the attacks on Donald Trump as a fascist came from three generals who worked for him. I mean, the most brutal critiques have come from people that have seen him far more closely than you or I combined, but I think that gets lumped in with what is a very thoughtful analysis about all of us—
PRITZKER: Yeah.
WALLACE: — at looking the other way has an equally harrowing echo in history.
PRITZKER: Yeah, I appreciate that and my point, and I think the point you’re making is that, you know, we’ve seen this before with totalitarians and authoritarians. That there’s a well-worn path throughout history, and you can recognize the signs of it, and that it just happens that the authoritarian and totalitarian history that I know best is having built a Holocaust museum, sitting next to those survivors for 10 years doing it and learning so much about the Holocaust, and my own family’s experience, you know, escaping the Russian killings of Jews in the 19th century in Ukraine.
I think it’s easy to recognize this. The question is, are people going to, you know, the, I think we all ought to go reread Martin Niemoller’s poem. “First They Came” is the name of it, and, you know, because it’s right.
I mean, if you can substitute different names in there for, you know, for socialists or Jews or, you know, trade unionists, and it all applies today, you know, it happens that what the Nazis did was they went after immigrants first. Just so happens, you know, and then they, and then they categorized people who were German citizens but weren’t maybe multi-generational German citizens as immigrants after they had demonized immigrants, right? And now you’re put in a demonized category.
