CNN analyst Samantha Vinograd on Saturday likened President Donald Trump's speech during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to rhetoric from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
In response to Trump's speech, CNN host Ana Cabrera played a few clips and asked the panel to respond.
"The men and women here today," Trump said, "on the front lines of protecting America's interests, defending America's value, and reclaiming our nation's priceless heritage. Right now we have people in Congress that hate our country, and you know that and we can name every one of them if they want. They hate our country."
Cabrera said "preserving our heritage" taps into darker times in U.S. history and that it could pose a national security threat, prompting Vinograd, who served multiple roles in the Obama administration, to say Trump's speech made her "sick."
"On a personal level, 'preserving our heritage, reclaiming our heritage' sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about 6 million other Jews in the 1940s ... The president talks about preserving our heritage as a catch-all for implementing policies that misallocate resources," said Vinograd, whose father is a Holocaust survivor. "He pretends that 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."
She later pondered how many items on Putin's to-do list Trump accomplished during his CPAC speech.
"He denigrated our institutions, the Department of Justice and the U.S. Congress. He spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. He undermined the credibility of several of our institutions. He sowed divisions. He sowed confusion. He was speaking to his base, but he was also saying things that really looked like Vladimir Putin scripted his speech," Vinograd said.
Vinograd isn't the first person to compare Trump to Hitler. Democratic congressman Hank Johnson (Ga.) made the comparison several times during a speech in early January, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
"Much like how Hitler took over the Nazi party, Trump has taken over the Republican Party," Johnson said.
"Americans, particularly black Americans, can't afford to make that same mistake about the harm that could be done by a man named Hitler or a man named Trump," he said.
The Republican Jewish Coalition responded by saying Johnson should be censured for his "unconscionable" remarks.