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Am I a traitor if I admit that I never gave a crap about Green Day? There it is: I never gave a crap about Green Day. When people in my generation were listening to Green Day, I was listening to… Fiona Apple, I think. Fiona and, like, classic rock. I was really into Led Zeppelin for a while. It’s only just now, at this very moment, that I’m realizing that Billie Joe Armstrong is years older than me (I always thought we were the same age). Anyway, Billie Joe and Green Day were always pretty political, but they did political music within a certain pop music framework, and that sort of worked for them. Billie Joe’s sensibilities are pretty liberal-progressive: he was an outspoken critic of the George W. Bush administration, and he endorsed Bernie Sanders last year, which I could have predicted even before I looked it up. So, what does Billie Joe think of this year’s election cycle? He thinks Trump is just flat-out Hitler.

Billie Joe Armstrong doesn’t label Donald Trump an American idiot. No, he’s compared him to someone much worse: Adolf Hitler. In an interview published in Kerrang, the Green Day frontman likened the Republican presidential hopeful to the historically villainous Austrian.

“The worst problem I see about Trump is who his followers are,” Armstrong told the British rock weekly. “I actually feel bad for them, because they’re poor, working-class people who can’t get a leg up. They’re pissed off and he’s preyed on their anger. He just said, ‘You have no options and I’m the only one, and I’m going to take care of it myself.’ I mean, that’s f—ing Hitler, man!”

He wasn’t finished there. “I don’t even know how else to explain it,” he added. “I wish I were over-exaggerating. And sometimes maybe I do over-exaggerate with Bush. But with Trump, I just can’t wait ’til he’s gone.”

[From Billboard]

This is funny to me: “Sometimes maybe I do over-exaggerate with Bush…” If Donald Trump has done anything, he’s made liberals and progressives almost nostalgic for George W. Bush. It’s true. In any side-by-side comparison between Trump and Dubya, Dubya ends up looking like a g-ddamn gentleman and statesman. Are we setting the bar too low? Of course. Because Billie Joe is right: Donald Trump is like Hitler. Godwin’s Law be damned.

Photos courtesy of WENN.
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