2020 Democratic front-runner Joe Biden claimed President Trump is creating similar conditions in the United States to those that existed in Nazi Germany leading up to the Holocaust.

"This is a guy who made a straight appeal for white supremacy. You saw those folks coming out of the fields out there in Charlottesville and everything since then, their veins bulging, the hate-spewing from them," the former vice president said Sunday evening at a fundraiser in Providence, Rhode Island, according to a pool report by Donita Naylor of the Providence Journal.

"I'm a student of the Holocaust. Same anti-Semitic bile that was chanted in the streets in Germany in the 1930s," he continued. "Same thing. Carrying Nazi flags and accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan."

Biden has long claimed that a principle reason he decided to run for the White House a third time was because of the white supremacist protest dubbed the "United the Right" in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 that left one counter-protester dead and scores of others injured.

Weeks after the incident, Biden wrote an op-ed for The Atlantic condemning Trump's response. The title of that piece, "We Are Living Through a Battle for the Soul of This Nation," has become a standard refrain in his campaign stump speeches.

"You, me, and the citizens of this country carry a special burden in 2017. We have to do what our president has not. We have to uphold America’s value," he wrote. "We have to do what he will not. We have to defend our Constitution. We have to remember our kids are watching. We have to show the world America is still a beacon of light."

Biden initially planned to announce his presidential campaign in the college town but abruptly canceled and instead opted for an online video.