Al Gore Compares Trump Administration To Nazi Germany

SAN FRANCISCO — Former Vice President Al Gore on Monday compared President Donald Trump's administration to Nazi Germany and issued a dire warning about Trump’s use of power in a speech devoted to climate change.

Speaking at an event at the start of San Francisco's Climate Week, Gore said the Trump administration was "trying to create their own preferred version of reality" to achieve their sweeping objectives similar to Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party in the 1930s and ‘40s.

"I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to any other movement," Gore said to an audience of roughly 150 climate advocates and policymakers gathered at a science museum on San Francisco's waterfront. "It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil."

Gore’s remarks follow sharp attacks on the Trump administration by a throng of party luminaries and former leaders in recent weeks.

Former President Barack Obama in a recent speech said he was “deeply concerned with a federal government that threatens universities if they don't give up students who are exercising their right to free speech," adding that the values of the U.S. under Trump have eroded. Former Vice President Kamala Harris accused the Trump administration of taking unconstitutional actions and said they are contributing to a "sense of fear.” And former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote in a New York Times guest essay that Trump was “squandering America’s strength and threatening our national security" — contributing to the battery of free-wheeling attacks as current officeholders in the Democratic Party calibrate their day-to-day approaches to the White House.

Gore, for his part, cited German philosophers' "moral autopsy on the Third Reich" in the aftermath of World War II.

"It was [Jürgen] Habermas' mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation's descent into hell was, and I quote, 'the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,"' Gore said. "He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, 'attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.' End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality."

White House officials didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Gore's remarks.

Gore, whose 2006 documentary about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award, also reeled off a series of assertions by Trump about climate change and energy technologies as part of his broadside on the administration's dismantling of previous Democratic administrations' climate policies.

"They say the climate crisis is a hoax invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing," he said. "They say coal is clean. They say wind turbines cause cancer. They say sea-level rise just creates more beachfront property."

Gore also invoked Martin Luther King, Jr., and the late Pope Francis in his 25-minute speech, which was largely devoted to exhorting the crowd to continue pursuing action on climate change.

"We've already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise of power," he said. "And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump," he said, to applause.

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie were in attendance and spoke after Gore. Pelosi highlighted climate policies like the Inflation Reduction Act and Pope Francis' climate advocacy, while Lurie touted San Francisco's recycling and renewable energy policies and investments in electric vehicle infrastructure.

Sophia Cai contributed to this report.