The head of the company that founded Cambridge Analytica said last year that President Donald Trump uses the same propaganda methods as Adolf Hitler did 80 years ago.

Nigel Oakes is the CEO of SCL Group, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the data mining company that used information it gleaned about Facebook users to try and help Trump during the 2016 elections.

Last year, Oakes was interviewed by a University of Essex professor about propaganda and its role in swaying public opinion during the Brexit referendum.

The transcripts of the interview were posted by a committee of the British Parliament.

The conversation, which also involved a senior communications official with the Leave.EU campaign, then turned to similarities between that effort and propaganda employed by the Nazis during their rise to power in Germany.

The head of the company that founded Cambridge Analytica said last year that President Donald Trump uses the same propaganda methods as Adolf Hitler did 80 years ago. Hitler is seen left in an undated file photo. Trump is seen right

‘Hitler, got to be very careful about saying so so, must never probably say this, off the record, but of course Hitler attacked the Jews, because... He didn’t have a problem with the Jews at all, but the people didn’t like the Jews,’ Oakes said.

‘So if the people… He could just use them to say… So he just leverage an artificial enemy.

‘Well that’s exactly what Trump did. He leveraged a Muslim- I mean, you know, it’s- It was a real enemy.

‘ISIS is a real, but how big a threat is ISIS really to America?

‘Really, I mean, we are still talking about 9/11, well 9/11 is a long time ago.’

Andy Wigmore, the former communications director for Leave.EU, also likened his campaign’s strategy to that of the Fuhrer’s ‘very clever’ propaganda efforts.

Nigel Oakes is the CEO of SCL Group, which is the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the data mining company that used information about Facebook users to try and help Trump during the 2016 elections

‘In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery,’ Wigmore said of the Nazis.

‘And looking at that now, in hindsight, having been on the sharp end of this campaign, you think: crikey, this is not new, and it’s just … using the tools that you have at the time.’

A spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica told Huffington Post that Oakes never worked for the company or the Trump campaign.

Oakes was ‘speaking in a personal capacity about the historical use of propaganda to an academic he knew well from her work in the defense sphere.’

Oakes said the consultancy was lined up to do work with Leave.EU in the event that it was designated as the official campaign to leave the European Union, according to transcripts of interviews published by a parliamentary committee.

Cambridge Analytica lies at the center of a storm for using data obtained from millions of Facebook users without their permission after it was hired by Trump for his 2016 US presidential election campaign.

The comparison between Trump and Hitler harkens back to criticism of the president for his apparent affinity for strongmen and dictators.

Since launching his campaign for president in 2015, Trump has praised world leaders who have been criticized by human rights groups for their authoritarian policies.

These include Russian President Vladimir Putin; Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte; Chinese President Xi Jinping; Egypt’s Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi; and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, according to NPR.