A new poll has revealed that more than one-third of Americans agree with Donald Trump’s warning that undocumented immigrants in the US are “poisoning the blood” of America.
A significant 34% of the respondents to the poll, conducted by the Brookings Institution and Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), agreed with the statement previously made on the election campaign trail by the former US president and Republican party nominee for the White House, Donald Trump.
“One-third of Americans (34%) say that immigrants entering the country illegally today are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’, including six in 10 Republicans (61%), 30% of independents, and only 13% of Democrats,” a summary of the annual poll stated, which surveyed more than 5,000 individuals from 16 August to 4 September.
“This is a truly alarming situation to find this kind of rhetoric, find this kind of support from one of our two major political parties,” said Robert Jones, president and founder of the PRRI, during a presentation of the poll’s findings. “That language is straight out of Mein Kampf. This kind of poisoning the blood, it’s Nazi rhetoric.”
Trump told supporters during a rally in New Hampshire in December 2023 that immigrants coming into the US are “poisoning the blood of our country”.
“They let – I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told the crowd. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
He repeated the phrase in a social media post after the rally and had previously used it in a September 2023 interview.
“Blood poisoning” was a term used by Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf manifesto. Trump’s comments incited a strong rebuke from the Biden campaign at the time.
The former Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie responded to Trump’s comments by stating: “He’s disgusting.”
The television presenter Geraldo Rivera recently cited the comments made by Trump in an interview with NewsNation, explaining why he would not vote for the former president. “I don’t know how any Latino person of any self-esteem, any self-respect, would be in favor of the ranting, the poisoning the blood of the country.”
The poll also found nearly one in four Trump supporters, 23%, believe if he loses the election that he should declare the results invalid and do whatever it takes to assume office.
