At a speech to a crowd of 1,800 at the Economic Club of Chicago on Tuesday, former President Barack Obama compared the actions of the current White House administration to the rise of Adolf Hitler’s Weimar Republic before World War II.

Though he did not refer to current President Donald Trump by name, Obama said that America must “tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly.

“That’s what happened in Germany in the 1930s which, despite the democracy of the Weimar Republic and centuries of high-level cultural and scientific achievements, Hitler rose to dominate,” Obama said.

Adolf Hitler came into power as head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi) party in 1933 through democratic elections.

“Sixty million people died, so you’ve got to pay attention – and vote,” he said.

It is interesting to note that Obama’s statements came one day before President Trump acknowledged Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people. This seems uncharacteristic of a Hitler-like persona. In comparison, in his last month in the Oval Office, then-President Obama abstained from a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) vote that declared Jewish housing in Jerusalem to be illegal, allowing the resolution to pass.

If Obama was indeed comparing President Trump to Hitler, it would mean that his political perspective is identical to that of North Korea’s despotic Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un. In June, the Korea Central News Agency published an editorial which claimed Trump’s strategy towards the Korean Peninsula was “based on Hitler’s dictatorial policies that separate people from their peers, justifies oppression and creates an atmosphere of fear in American political, social, media and information circles”.