MSNBC's Chris Matthews Issues Apology to Bernie Sanders

MSNBC's Chris Matthews

MSNBC’s Chris Matthews apologized to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) for comparing the Democratic presidential candidate's victory in the Nevada caucuses to a Nazi invasion.

The Hill reports Matthews started his “Hardball” on Monday by saying he wanted to “say something quite important and personal.”

“As I watched the one-sided results of Saturday's Democratic caucus in Nevada, I reached for a historic analogy and used a bad one,” he said. “I was wrong to refer to an event from the last days, or actually the first days, of World War II.”

Chris Matthews apologizes to Bernie Sanders and his supporters for comparing Bernies NV win to Nazis taking France in WWII pic.twitter.com/gMq9mnq30i

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) February 25, 2020

He then directed his comments at Sanders, saying “I’m sorry for comparing anything from that tragic era in which so many suffered, especially the Jewish people, to an electorate result in which you were the well-deserved winner.”

The MSNBC host faced massive criticism, including from an MSNBC contributor, after he compared Sanders’s win in Nevada to the Nazi invasion of France, leading several on social media to call for Matthews’s resignation.

"I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940," Matthews said during MSNBC's live coverage of the caucuses. "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.'"

Sanders, who would become the first Jewish president should he be elected, has relatives who died in the Holocaust.