LAS VEGAS — Democrats have often likened Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, but a top Nevada state senator Thursday brought the hyperbole into the 21st century, saying the ex-prez and presumptive GOP presidential nominee is the American equivalent of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.
“If Donald Trump becomes president, everything that we have in the bank goes away because he’d be a dictator,” declared Pat Spearman of North Las Vegas. “He’ll be a dictator. Don’t believe me, look at Russia, look at Russia,”
“I’m always worried when a dictator is on the ballot,” the state Senate president pro tempore said. “Let me be clear: I’m always worried when people are still trying to take back the rights that we have fought for. I’m always worried when people start talking about going back pre-1954,” the year of a Supreme Court decision striking “separate-but-equal” school systems segregated by race.
When The Post flatly asked, “Are you saying Donald Trump is the equivalent of Putin?” Spearman responded, “Yes, yeah. Yes.”
The unflattering analogy came as Spearman, a former US Army Military Police lt. colonel who spent 29 years in the service, was joined by a gaggle of military veterans at the local Biden-Harris campaign headquarters to help launch “Veterans and Military Families for Biden-Harris,” billed as a “national organizing coalition” to enlist military voters to support the embattled Democratic nominee.
“Project 2025 scares the hell out of me,” Spearman said, “because it goes against Project 1776. As far as everything we have fought for, everything that we died for.”
She vowed that the Heritage Foundation document — which Trump has disavowed as his post-election blueprint — would fail: “Not on my watch,” she said.
Spearman claimed veteran support will carry the Silver State for the ticket. “He has our back and we’re gonna have his back this November,” she said. “We’re going to knock on doors, going to make phone calls. We’re going to talk to our neighbors, and most importantly, we are going to vote. We’re going to focus on the sacrifice of millions of Americans that preceded us is not in vain.”
Entrepreneur Shaundell Newsome, a 10-year Air Force veteran, said Trump didn’t care about the military.
“You know, Joe Biden is a military father, so he understands what we’re going through,” he said. Biden “can empathize with us. He is not calling us suckers and everything else that the former president had put out there.”