Snopes Claims Trump Tweet Is Basically Mein Kampf

Last Updated on February 14, 2020

An article in Snopes claims that one of President Trump’s tweets from 2018 “echoes a passage” from “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler.

Snopes analysed the claim, “a tweet from U.S. President Donald Trump attacking the press echoes a passage from Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’,” and determined it was “correctly attributed.”

The claim comes tweet from August 2018 from Jules Suzdaltsev, a “Twitter critic” of President Trump. Suzdaltsev was once so upset that the President blocked him on Twitter, that he, along with 40 others, sued to be unblocked, claiming it was a violation of his First Amendment rights.

He is, ironically, rather quick with the block button himself. Suzdaltsev said that the President was “literally just translating Mein Kampf at this point,” when he criticised the press in a tweet.

I mean, he’s literally just translating Mein Kampf at this point. pic.twitter.com/Gddw4WqjDT

— Jules Suzdaltsev (@jules_su) August 16, 2018

“There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS,” President Trump tweeted. “The fact is that the Press is FREE to write and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS, pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people. HONESTY WINS!”

There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS. The fact is that the Press is FREE to write and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS, pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people. HONESTY WINS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2018

Suzdaltsev compared the quote to a passage from “Mein Kampf,” where Hitler criticised the press.

“It is the press, above all, which wages a positively fanatical and slanderous struggle, tearing down everything which can be regarded as a support for national independence, cultural elevation, and the economic independence of the nation,” the Nazi leader wrote.

Snopes verified the quotes from Trump and Hitler as being “correctly attributed.” This rating “indicates that quoted material (speech or text) has been correctly attributed to the person who spoke or wrote it,” Snopes says.

They are careful not to say that it is verifiably true that President Trump’s words echo that of Hitler’s. “To what extent the two statements presented above resemble each other is something of a subjective issue,” Snopes writes, but immediately goes on to argue that “many critics… have drawn parallels between Trump’s and Hitler’s attacks on the mainstream press.”

Snopes quotes Burt Neuborne, a civil rights lawyer, to back up this argument:

[Hitler and Trump] unceasingly attack objective truth. “Both Trump and Hitler maintained a relentless assault on the very idea of objective truth,” [Neuborne says]. “Each began the assault by seeking to delegitimize the mainstream press. Hitler quickly coined the epithet Lügenpresse (literally ‘lying press’) to denigrate the mainstream press. Trump uses a paraphrase of Hitler’s lying press epithet — ‘fake news’ — cribbed, no doubt, from one of Hitler’s speeches. For Trump, the mainstream press is a ‘lying press’ that publishes ‘fake news.’” Hitler attacked his opponents as spreading false information to undermine his positions, Neuborne says, just as Trump has attacked “elites” for disseminating false news.

It further begs the question as to why exactly Snopes decided to suddenly “investigate” this claim, when both tweets were written almost 18 months ago. What do they have to gain from this?