Donald Trump, the Republican nominee whose former chief of staff describes as a "fascist" who praises Adolf Hitler, continued his dehumanizing attacks on immigrants at a campaign stop in Arizona on Thursday, describing them as human refuse.
"People coming out of the Congo. Not just South America. They're coming from 181 countries as of yesterday," the former president said at a rally in Tempe. "We're a dumping ground. We're like a garbage can for the world. That's what's happened. That what's happened to — we're like a garbage can."
Trump, echoing Nazi rhetoric, has previously claimed that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." Earlier this month, he also asserted that immigrants are genetically inferior, claiming that their "bad genes" make them more likely to commit violent crimes, a lie contradicted by studies that have repeatedly shown that immigrants commit fewer criminal offenses than native-born Americans. If elected, he also promised a militarized campaign of deportation that would entail arresting and detaining millions of people in internment camps.
Demonizing those born outside the United States is nothing new for the 78-year-old, now in his third campaign for the White House. In 2015, Trump formally launched his political career with a racist attack on Mexican immigrants as largely "rapists" and criminals; he has since himself been found liable for sexual assault and convicted of 34 felonies.
As Trump has aged, however, he has become even less filtered in public, noted Kristen Holmes, a correspondent for CNN.
"There's all this conversation about Donald Trump really going off the rails, but a lot of what he is saying now publicly is stuff we know he has said in private — the cursing, the denigrating remarks," Holmes commented Friday. "Now he's just taking it to the campaign trail."
