The former president and current Republican candidate repeats xenophobic speeches and Nazi rhetoric
Former President of the United States Donald Trump April 27, 2023
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Portal Donald Trump, the Republican Party's leading presidential candidate, claimed on Saturday (16) that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” repeating language previously criticized for xenophobia and echoing Nazi rhetoric.
Trump made the comments during a campaign rally in New Hampshire, where he criticized the number of migrants attempting to cross the U.S. border illegally. Trump has promised to crack down on illegal immigration and restrict legal immigration if elected to a second fouryear term.
“They are poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said at a rally in the city of Durham attended by several thousand supporters, adding that immigrants were coming to the United States from Asia and Africa as well as South America. “From all over the world.” World, they are invading our country.
Trump used the same phrase, “blood poisoning,” in an interview published in late September with The National Pulse, a rightwing website. This led to a rebuke from the AntiDefamation League, whose leader Jonathan Greenblatt called the language “racist, xenophobic and despicable.”
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Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of a book on fascism, said Trump's repeated use of such language was dangerous. He said Trump's words echoed the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who warned of German blood poisoning by Jews in his political treatise “Mein Kampf.”
“He now uses this vocabulary repeatedly at rallies. Repeating dangerous speech further normalizes it and the practices it recommends,” Stanley said. “This is very concerning for the safety of immigrants in the United States.”
In October, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed criticism of the former president's language as “nonsense,” arguing that similar language was common in books, news articles and on television.
When asked about the issue on Saturday, Cheung did not directly address Trump's comments and instead mentioned the controversy over how U.S. universities have handled campus protests since the Hamas attack in Israel on Oct. 7. He stated that the media and academia had provided “safe haven for dangerous and alarming antiSemitic and proHamas rhetoric.”
The phrase “poisoning the blood of our country” was not included in Trump's prepared speeches that he distributed to the press before Saturday's event, and it was unclear whether the use of that rhetoric was planned or adopted at the time.
Trump is the Republican Party's frontrunner for the 2024 presidential nomination and has made border security a major issue in his campaign. He promises to restore the strict policies of his term from 2017 to 2021 and introduce new rules that further restrict immigration.
President Joe Biden, the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee, has sought to impose a more humane and orderly immigration policy but has faced record numbers of migrants, an issue seen as a weak point for his reelection campaign.
During the campaign, Trump repeatedly used inflammatory language to describe the border issue and criticize Biden's policies. On Saturday, he recited the lyrics to a song he adapted to compare immigrants to deadly snakes.
If reelected, Trump promised to “stop the invasion of our southern border and launch the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”