Veteran singer Linda Ronstadt likens Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, calls Mexicans 'new Jews'
Veteran singer Linda Ronstadt on December 30 compared President Donald Trump to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
In a preview clip of the interview, the 73-year-old was seen drawing parallels between the Weimer Republic in Germany and today’s United States after the host told her: “You have read a lot about the Weimar Republic in Germany, and you sort of see great parallels between then and now.”
Ronstadt said there are indeed great parallels between the two situations.
“Great parallels. I mean the intelligentsia of Berlin and literati and all artists were just doing their thing, and as Hitler rose to power, there were a lot of chances to stop him, and they didn’t speak out," she said.
"The industrial complex thought they could control him once they got him in office, and of course, he was not controllable. By the time he got established, he put his own people in place and stacked the courts and did what he had to do to consolidate his power, and we got Hitler. He destroyed Germany, destroyed centuries of intellectual history, forward and backward. People like Beethoven, Goethe, and Thomas Mann became jokes. They became Nazi laughing stocks," the icon said.
She also added that Mexicans are the “new Jews”.
Given Trump’s popularity, Cooper also told his guest that a lot of people would be surprised to hear comparisons between events that had happened in Hitler’s Germany and Trump’s US. To that, the Grammy winner said one should not be if he/she has read history.
“If you read the history, you won't be surprised. It's exactly the same," she said. "You find a common enemy for everybody to hate. I was sure that Trump was going to get elected the day he announced. And I said, 'It's going to be like Hitler, and the Mexicans are the new Jews.' And sure enough, that's what he delivered, you know?”
Ronstadt told Mike Pompeo he was enabling Trump
The veteran musician, who is known to be a critic of the Republican leader, made the headlines earlier in December when she told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a departmental gala where she was being honored that he was “enabling Donald Trump”.
She confronted Pompeo who had referred to her famous ‘When Will I Be Loved’ song of 1975 and said he kept wondering when he himself will be loved as he traveled the world. Ronstadt told him that he will be loved when he stopped enabling Trump.
“I’d like to say to Mr Pompeo, who wonders when he’ll be loved, it’s when he stops enabling Donald Trump," she said during her speech at the event at Kennedy Center.
As a matter of caution, Ronstadt also said during the interview that some of her family members in Tucson are Republicans and she was careful that the actions of the current administration did not ruin her family relationships. She also said that there are no rational Republicans in the current administration at the White House.
“I have to be careful because we’ve had so much taken away from us by this administration that I’m not willing to let him take my family relationships away. The parts that were Republican were fairly rational Republicans. We don’t have that in that current White House.”