Former Vice President Al Gore (D) compared the Trump administration to the Third Reich in Germany on Monday while giving remarks at a kickoff event for San Francisco’s Climate Week.

“I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil,” Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize awardee, told attendees.

“It was [Jürgen] Habermas’ mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell was, and I quote, ‘the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,”’ Gore said, quoting the famed German philosopher and social theorist. 

“He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’ End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality,” he added. 

Gore's comments come months after Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, compared President Trump’s 2024 campaign rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden to a 1939 pro-Nazi event.

Gore, who spent eight years as vice president before losing a historically close election to George W. Bush, has spent years championing environmental sustainability in presentations and lectures across the globe. His work became the subject of the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth," about Gore’s efforts to educate the public about global warming. 

The second Trump administration has rapidly sought to deregulate the manufacturing and production industries, and roll back policies that combat environmental pollution and global warming. 

It also pulled $4 million federal funds from Princeton University for programs that supported research for climate threats. Officials have threatened to do the same at other institutions. 

Earlier this month, the president signed an executive order limiting states’ ability to protect air, water and natural resources from pollution, describing policies as “burdensome” and “ideologically motivated.”

But Gore's criticism at Monday's climate event went well beyond environmental concerns, touching on Trump's immigration and deportation actions, which are testing the constitutional powers of the presidency.

“We’ve already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise of power,” he said. 

“And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump,” Gore added.