“Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. And he went about the business of discrediting institutions to the point that people bought into it,” Clyburn said. “Nobody would have believed it now. But swastikas hung in churches throughout Germany. We had better be very careful.”

Trump is targeting McCain, who died of brain cancer in 2018, in the same way that he has sought to discredit past presidents, he added. Clyburn’s comments come after the president blasted the now-deceased Republican senator on Feb. 16 for his alleged role in the dissemination of the Christopher Steele dossier, which some conservatives believe kick-started the Russian investigation.

“I think all of us know that impeachment is a political concept. And if the committees do their work properly they will be able to bring the public along with them,” he said. “They will be able to set the tone for impeachment if that is deserved.” This is not the first time that the South Carolina Democrat has compared Trump to Hitler, a man who historians argue is responsible for thrusting the world into war during the 1930s.

“We are approaching a place that we’ve been before,” Clyburn told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in 2017, indicating that he thinks the country is on the path toward Nazi Germany. “We remember from our studies what happened in the 1930s in Germany. I told a business group down at Hilton Head several weeks before the election, that what I saw coming was a replay of what happened in Nazi Germany.”