What would MSNBC late night be without a Nazi reference? Earlier on Tuesday evening, Brian Williams assailed the State of the Union address as “dark” and “bizarre.” In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Jonathan Alter saw shades of Joseph Goebbels and “the big lie.”
Attacking Trump as a repeated liar, the former Newsweek editor invoked the Nazis: “But when you're doing it repeatedly in real time, and part of it is Goebbels, the big lie. If you're saying you're protecting people with pre-existing conditions when you're in court trying to strip them of those protections at the same moment, that's not just a lie. That's a big lie.”
Alter sadly admitted that the Nazi-esque Trump would get a “bump in the polls.”
And what I think is scary for a lot of Democrats is he's going to run a big lie campaign all the way to the election. And on a certain level, unfortunately, lying works. People have busy lives. They can't go to the fact checks and find everything out, what's really true. And so this speech worried me, and I think you are going to see him get a bump in the polls out of it.
Former Time editor Richard Stengel echoed the Nazi comparison and the idea that the speech was a success: “I'm a little worried too. By the way, the Goebbels idea is that familiarity seems like truthfulness to people when he repeats a lie over and over, it seems truthful.”
In the same segment, PBS journalist Yamiche Alcindor exchoriated Rush Limbaugh, who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, as the “face of racism”:
Of course Republicans were cheering. Rush Limbaugh recently said he has lung cancer. There are a lot of people in the Republican party who love rush Limbaugh. But for Democrats and a lot of people, independents and African-Americans, he's just seen as someone who is the face of racism, frankly.
A partial transcript is below:
MSNBC
2/5/2020
12:12 AM ETYAMICHE ALCINDOR (PBS Newshour correspondent): Of course Republicans were cheering. Rush Limbaugh recently said he has lung cancer. There are a lot of people in the Republican party who love rush Limbaugh. But for Democrats and a lot of people, independents and African-Americans, he's just seen as someone who is the face of racism, frankly.
12:18
JONATHAN ALTER: He [Trump] is a master marketer, and he understands, as Mark Twain said, that a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. And it's one thing to lie in tweets and, you know, people are absorbing them at different times, and it goes through the news cycle. But when you're doing it repeatedly in real time, and part of it is Goebbels, the big lie. If. You're saying you're protecting people with pre-existing conditions when you're in court trying to strip them of those protections at the same moment, that's not just a lie. That's a big lie. And what I think is scary for a lot of Democrats is he's going to run a big lie campaign all the way to the election. And on a certain level, unfortunately, lying works. People have busy lives. They can't go to the fact checks and find everything out, what's really true. And so this speech worried me, and I think you are going to see him get a bump in the polls out of it.
RICK STENGEL: I'm a little worried too. By the way, the Goebbels idea is that familiarity seems like truthfulness to people when he repeats a lie over and over, it seems truthful.
