Roger Waters compared Donald Trump’s candidacy to Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany during an interview on WTF With Marc Maron.
The former Pink Floyd bassist and host Marc Maron spoke throughout the interview about class, inequality and injustice, and towards the end Waters discussed the ways in which fascism can creep into a society: “It was insidious in Germany in the Thirties when National Socialism came. And National Trumpism feels a bit less insidious, but it’s just as dangerous.”
He continued: “The method for taking over the state and for it becoming a totalitarian police state, is always the same, and it’s always the identification of ‘the other’ as the enemy. In Trump’s case, it’s the Chinese, the Mexicans, and Islam – it doesn’t matter who it is. With Hitler, it was the Jews, the Communists, the Gypsies, anybody who had a physical deformity, or whatever it might be, the homosexuals – they were all lumped together.”
Waters went on to note that much of contemporary America seems struck by a sense of defeat and economic stagnation, much like Germany was following World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. “What you have in the States now is everybody’s standard of living is falling, like a freefall, and also where the freedoms that are enshrined in your Constitution and in the Bill of Rights are being slowly eroded and taken away from you,” Waters said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Waters spoke about his childhood in pre-World War II England and a monumental trip he took to Beirut as a teenager, during which he first started to become aware of injustice and inequality. Waters also spoke about his set at Desert Trip, relationships with other rock legends and sprawling catalog of music.
