MSNBC host Chris Matthews issued an apology to Sen. Bernie Sanders on his program Monday, two days after comparing the self-described democratic socialist’s surging campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to Nazi Germany’s conquest of Europe at the start of World War II.

“Before getting into tonight’s news, I want to say something quite important and personal,” Matthews said at the top of his nightly “Hardball” show. “As I watched the one-sided results of Saturday’s Democratic caucus in Nevada, I reached for an historical analogy and used a bad one.

“Senator Sanders, I’m sorry for comparing anything from that tragic era in which so many suffered, especially the Jewish people, to an electoral result in which you were the well-deserved winner,” Matthews said. “This is going to be a hard-fought, heated campaign of ideas. And the days and weeks and months ahead, I’ll strive to do a better job myself of elevating the political discussion.”

On Saturday night, Matthews said Sanders’s dominating victory in the Nevada caucuses over more mainstream rivals was comparable to Adolf Hitler’s invasion of France.

“I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” Matthews said during MSNBC’s live coverage of the caucus returns. “And the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says, ‘How can that be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’”

If elected, Sanders would be America’s first Jewish president, yet Matthews’s remarks were the second time in as many weeks that an MSNBC host compared the campaign of the Democratic candidate, who himself lost relatives in the Holocaust to Nazi Germany, to the Nazis.

Earlier this month, “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd read an article on the air comparing Sanders supporters to brownshirts, or Nazi storm troopers. Todd’s comments earned a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. Read more

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