A combat veteran now serving in Congress has joined those reprimanding U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson for comparing President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler and describing Trump's Republican supporters as the dregs of society.
On Sunday, U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, released a two-minute video on Twitter to admonish Johnson for the speech he delivered last week at an Atlanta NAACP gathering at Friendship Baptist Church.
“OK, Mr. Johnson: President Trump is a lot of things, but he’s not Hitler. He didn’t kill millions of people, he didn’t start a world war, he doesn’t have any concentration camps. And to accuse him of being Hitler is intellectually dishonest and frankly a huge insult to millions of Jews who died under Nazi Germany.”
He then went on to criticize Johnson’s “cowardly form of politics” for his remarks. At the event, the DeKalb Democrat called Trump supporters “older, less educated, less prosperous” and that many were dying from alcohol addictions, drug problems or “simply a broken heart caused by economic despair.”
Crenshaw, a Navy SEAL best known for being mocked on “Saturday Night Live” for his eye injury he sustained in an Afghanistan bombing, said he can’t “imagine a worse form of leadership” than what Johnson displayed.
"This is not the behavior we expect from a member of Congress," Crenshaw said. "So I'll leave you with this. Pick on somebody your own size. Pick on me if you like. My office will be right down the hall from yours."
Johnson has defended his remarks in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"I wanted to make the point that our democracy is under severe threat, that freedom is threatened, and that if we are not vigilant we can allow tyranny to set in," he said.
“I made the point that this threat to democracy is a trend across the world, and we can’t let this happen in our country.”
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