President-elect Joe Biden on Friday chided Republican senators that raised questions about the validity of the 2020 presidential elections based on voting irregularities and allegations of voter fraud.
According to Biden, Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) repeated President Donald Trump's "big lie" about the elections being rigged in favor of Biden. He compared Hawley and Cruz's actions to those of Nazi Germany's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.
“They’re part of the big lie, the big lie. I was being reminded by a friend of mine, and maybe you were with me, I can’t recall, when we told that, you know, [Joseph] Goebbels and the great lie, you keep repeating the law and repeating the lie. Well, there was a print that when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed — was it 2,500 people that were killed? And Goebbels said 'No, 25,000 — or 250,000 were killed.' And our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s the big lie," Biden said during an interview with CBS News.
"It's one thing for one man, one woman, to repeat the lie over and over and over again," the president-elect said.
Biden tells @NikolenDC that GOP senators who supported election falsehoods, like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, are "part of the big lie," and references Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels https://t.co/ho31YYlJfR pic.twitter.com/ukQMDFebHq
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 8, 2021
Cruz took to Twitter to respond to the comparison, saying the divisive rhetoric only further divides the country.
Really sad. At a time of deep national division, President-elect Biden’s choice to call his political opponents literal Nazis does nothing to bring us together or promote healing.
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) January 8, 2021
This kind of vicious partisan rhetoric only tears our country apart. https://t.co/YMMepv1OhV
Hawley slammed Biden's comparison as "undignified" and "immature."
"President-elect Biden has just compared me and another Republican Senator to Nazis. You read that correctly. Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. Because I raised questions in the format prescribed by the laws of the United States about the way elections were conducted in the state of Pennsylvania, just as Democrats did about other states in 2001, 2005, and 2017, he is calling me a Nazi," Hawley said in a statement. "This is undignified, immature, and intemperate behavior from the President-elect. It is utterly shameful. He should act like a dignified adult and retract these sick comments. And every Democrat member of congress should be asked to disavow these disgusting comments."