Some allies of former President Donald Trump jumped to his defense amid alarm over a rally speech that the Biden campaign argued had “parroted Adolf Hitler.”
Trump claimed during a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants 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 said. “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.”
Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of country.. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world not just in South America… but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia pic.twitter.com/fv38EABo1a
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 16, 2023
NBC News noted that the term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his manifesto “Main Kampf,” in which he rails against immigration and race mixing.
“All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., on Sunday defended the former president’s remarks.
“Seventy-six percent of the American people, not Donald Trump, believe the border is broken. They’re worried about fentanyl coming over killing them,” the Trump ally told NBC News host Kristen Welker when asked how Republicans feel about the comments.
“But what about his language? Just that language that poisoning the blood?” Welker pressed.
“Yeah, no I am worried about an outcome,” Graham replied. “He is right — he had the border secured the lowest in 40 years in December of 2022. The Biden administration, you’re talking about Donald Trump’s language, as you sat on the sidelines and allowed the country to be invaded 172 people on the terrorist list have come on your watch fentanyl is filling more Americans.”
Welker again asked Graham if he felt comfortable with Trump’s “language.”
“You know, we’re talking about language? I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right,” Graham replied. “If you’re talking about the language Trump uses rather than trying to fix it, that’s a losing strategy for the Biden administration,” he added.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Monday also complained that “they” didn’t “like his rhetoric” at the rally.
“He was talking about the border. He was talking about people coming from other countries, coming from prisons. And they wanted to focus on all the Sunday shows, Lawrence, on the word he used ‘poison,'” Kilmeade lamented, according to Mediaite.
“He’s just trying to say we want to keep America, America,” he said. “We want to build up the border and find out who’s coming in and out. And they tried to say that this language was the problem.”
The White House and the Biden campaign condemned Trump’s remarks over the weekend.
“Tonight Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement on Saturday.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates accused Trump of “echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government.”
Trump’s Republican primary rival Chris Christie also condemned the remarks during a Sunday appearance on CNN.
“He’s disgusting, and what he’s doing is dog-whistle to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strained from the economy and from the conflicts around the world, and he’s dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us,” Christie said. “The other problem with this is the Republicans who are saying this is OK.”
Donald Trump’s actions are unacceptable.
— Chris Christie (@GovChristie) December 17, 2023
Those who support him are enabling him and should be ashamed of themselves. pic.twitter.com/wF0EGgc8QV
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat on CNN called Trump’s comments “fascist rhetoric.”
“The worries about polluting the blood of the superior race go as a standard of Nazism. It’s not just the Nazis. It’s also fascists. In Italy Mussolini literally talked about killing rats, to go back to Trump’s use of vermin in an earlier speech. He talked about killing rats who were bringing infectious diseases and communism into Italy,” the New York University professor explained.
Ben-Ghiat cited Trump’s earlier comments vowing mass deportations and mass detentions, arguing that he was using “fascist rhetoric” for a “very precise purpose.”
“Dehumanizing immigrants, which is what this language does, is a way to get Americans prepared now to accept these repressions later on,” she said. “That’s what’s so terrible, and that’s also another thing that’s so fascist about this.”
She also warned that immigrants will not be the only ones targeted.
“Anyone who thinks this isn’t going to bother them because they’re not an immigrant, they’re not going to stop with immigrants,” she said. “I’m quite concerned that he is mentioning what he calls mental institutions and prisons so often. In another speech, he actually talked about the need to expand psychiatric institutions to confine people and he mentioned special prosecutor Jack Smith as someone who should end up in a ‘mental institution.’
“This is what fascists and especially communists used to do to critics,” Ben-Ghiat added. “They used to put people who didn’t believe in the propaganda of the state or who were troublemakers into psychiatric institutions. So the swathe of people who are going to be targeted certainly doesn’t stop with immigrants.”
