Donald Trump Defends Retweeting Quote From Mussolini

By Forward Staff February 29, 2016

Donald Trump defended posting a quote from Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini on his Twitter account Sunday.

The Republican frontrunner said he saw nothing wrong with retweeting the quote “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep” from a Twitter site named after Adolf Hitler’s closest wartime ally.

“Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. It’s OK,” Trump said on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press.’ “It’s a very good quote…I know who said it. But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else? It’s certainly a very interesting quote.”

Trump continued that he likes to Tweet “interesting quotes” to his legions of loyal followers on social media.

“I want to be associated with interesting quotes. And people, you know, I have almost 14 million people between Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and all of that. And we do interesting things. And I sent it out. And certainly, hey, it got your attention, didn’t it?”

Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in the early 1920s and ran the nation for more than two decades, paving the way for other fascist regimes to take control, including Hitler’s in Germany. The leader known as Il Duce was toppled from power in 1943 as the Nazi-led war effort faltered. The was captured and executed in April 1945.

Trump last month retweeted a post from a white supremacist site that had previously Tweeted a photoshopped image of Trump sending Democrat Bernie Sanders to the gas chamber.

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