Ex-Obama NSC Aide Equates Trump’s ‘Reclaiming . . . Heritage’ Remark to Nazi Propaganda

CNN analyst Samantha Vinograd, who served on President Obama’s National Security Council, likened President Trump’s recent comments about preserving American heritage to Nazi propaganda during a Saturday appearance on CNN.

“Well, Ana, his statement makes me sick, on a personal level. ‘Preserving our heritage,’ ‘reclaiming our heritage,’ that sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about 6 million other Jews in the 1940s,” Vinograd told CNN’s Ana Cabrera when asked to respond to Trump’s Saturday address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Trump, in a fiery two-hour address, railed against Democratic obstruction and suggested it was rooted in a hatred for traditional American values and the “patriots” in attendance at the conference in National Harbor, Md.

“The men and women here today are on the front lines of protecting America’s interests, defending America’s values, and reclaiming our nation’s priceless heritage,” Trump said. “With your help, we are reversing decades of blunders and betrayals. These are serious, serious betrayals to our nation and to everything we stand for. It’s been done by the failed ruling class that enriched foreign countries at our expense. It wasn’t America first; in many cases it was America last. Those days are over, long over.”

Vinograd, who now works as a senior adviser at the University of Delaware’s Biden Institute, went on to argue that Trump has entirely manufactured the “crisis” at the southern border to further a nefarious, fascist agenda.

“The president talks about preserving our heritage as a catch-all for implementing policies that misallocate resources,” she said. “He pretends there are massive flows of illegal immigrants coming over our borders and is spending billions of dollars on a border-wall emergency, instead of paying attention to real national-security threats.”

A number of Republicans responded to Vinograd’s attack by pointing out that Vice President Joe Biden, whose institute she works for, made remarks similar to Trump’s in 2011.