FDR’s Wartime Violations of Civil Liberties Are Not a Good Precedent for Anything

And you don’t get points for not being as bad.

Last night on The Kelly File, Carl Higbie, the spokesman for a pro-Trump PAC, defended the idea of a federal registry of Muslims by citing the World War II–era internment of Japanese Americans as a precedent, weakly adding “call it what you will, it may be wrong”:

Megyn Kelly immediately leaped on this, and Higbie quickly declared that he did not in fact favor internment camps. The video then went viral.

The video also gave me a dose of deja vu. Last December, shortly after Trump started pitching the idea of keeping Muslims out of America, this exchange took place on Good Morning America:

DONALD TRUMP: What I’m doing is no different than what FDR— FDR’s solution for German, Italian, Japanese…

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you’re for internment camps?

TRUMP: This was a president highly respected by all. He did the same thing. If you look at what he was doing, it was far worse. I mean, he was talking about the Germans because we’re at war. We are now at war. We have a president that doesn’t want to say that…

Read the rest by Jesse Walker at Reason.