On Sunday, a guest on Brian Stelter’s CNN show “Reliable Sources” claimed that President Donald Trump “may be responsible for many more million deaths than” Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, as The Hill reports.
The guest was the former chairman of psychiatry at Duke University, Allen Frances. Frances accused President Trump of being “as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were in the last century,” adding that “he needs to be contained.”
As the segment was ostensibly focusing on President Trump’s mental health, Frances also claimed that calling the president mentally ill would be “a terrible insult to the mentally ill,” claiming that the mentally ill are more “well-behaved” and “well-mannered” than the president.
After widespread backlash on social media, Stelter claimed that he did not challenge Frances’ comments because he “was distracted by tech difficulties.”
Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich is estimated at having been responsible for the deaths of 10 million civilians in the Holocaust. Joseph Stalin, through his use of gulag death camps and forced starvations, is believed to have killed at least 20 million people. And estimates for the death total of Mao Zedong’s reign in China range from as low as 30 million to as high as 70 or 80 million, making his the deadliest regime in history.