Some allies of former President Donald Trump jumped to his defense amid alarm over a rally speech that the Biden campaign claimed “was a parrot of 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 or 16 million people in our country. When they do, we have a lot of work to do. “They are poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said. “This is what they have done. They are poisoning mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just in three or four countries that we are thinking of, but all over the world. They are coming to our country from Africa, from Asia, from all over the world.”
NBC News noted that the term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in his “Main Kampf” manifesto in which he criticized immigration and race mixing.
Hitler wrote: “All the great cultures of the past have perished only because the original creative race died of blood poisoning.”
On Sunday, RSC Senator Lindsey Graham defended the former president’s comments.
“76% of the American people, not Donald Trump, believe the border has been breached. “They’re worried that fentanyl is coming to kill them,” the Trump ally told NBC News host Kristen Welker when asked how Republicans felt about the comments.
“But what about his language? Just the language that poisons the blood?” Welker pressed.
Graham replied: “Yes, no, I’m worried about the outcome.” “He’s right — he did secure the border to a 40-year low in December of 2022. The Biden administration, you’re talking Donald Trump’s language, while you sat on the sidelines and allowed 172 people to invade the country on your terrorist list. , fentanyl fills more Americans.
Welker asked Graham again if he felt comfortable with Trump’s “language.”
“Did you know we’re talking about language? I don’t care much about the language people use as long as we get it right,” Graham replied. “If you’re talking about the language Trump uses instead of trying to fix it, that’s a losing strategy for the Biden administration.”
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade also complained Monday that they “didn’t like his rhetoric” at the rally.
“He was talking about borders. He was talking about people coming from other countries, coming from prisons. And they wanted to focus in all the Sunday shows, Lawrence, on the word he used, ‘poison,'” Kilmeade said, according to Mediaite.
“He’s just trying to say we want to keep America, America,” he said. “We want to build borders and know who comes in and who goes out. They tried to say that this language is the problem.”
The White House and Biden campaign condemned Trump’s comments over the weekend.
“Tonight, Donald Trump set an example as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin as he ran for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa said in a statement. on saturday.
White House spokesman Andrew Bates accused Trump of “echoing the ugly rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists and threatening to oppress those who disagree with the government.”
Chris Christie, Trump’s Republican primary rival, also condemned the comments during a Sunday appearance on CNN.
“It’s disgusting, and what it does is just a siren call to Americans who feel under pressure and stress because of the economy and conflicts around the world, and it’s a whistle blower to blame people from areas that don’t seem like that.” Christie said. “The other problem with this is that Republicans say this is a good thing.”
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Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat on CNN described Trump’s comments as “fascist rhetoric.”
“Concerns about tainting the blood of a superior race are standard for Nazism. It’s not just Nazis. It’s also fascists. And in Italy, Mussolini literally talked about killing rats, going back to Trump’s use of insects in an earlier speech. “He talked about killing rats,” the New York University professor explained. About killing the rats that were bringing infectious diseases and communism to Italy.”
Bin Ghiyath cited Trump’s previous comments in which he pledged mass deportations and mass arrests, saying he was using “fascist rhetoric” for a “very specific goal.”
“Dehumanizing immigrants, which this language does, is a way to make Americans willing now to accept this oppression later,” she said. “That’s what’s so terrible, and that’s also another thing that’s so fascist about it.”
She also warned that migrants would not be the only ones targeted.
“Anyone who thinks this won’t bother them because they’re not an immigrant won’t stop at immigrants,” she said. “I’m very concerned that he mentions what he calls mental institutions and prisons too often. In another speech, he actually talked about the need to expand psychiatric institutions to confine people and mentioned Special Prosecutor Jack Smith as someone who should end up in a ‘mental institution.’
Bin Ghiyath added: “This is what the fascists, especially the communists, used to do to their critics.” “They are used to putting people who do not believe in state propaganda or troublemakers in psychiatric institutions. So the group of people who will be targeted is certainly not limited to migrants.
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About Trump’s troubling rhetoric
Former President Donald Trump’s allies are coming to his defense following criticism of a recent rally speech that has been compared to one made by Adolf Hitler. Despite the controversy, many of Trump’s supporters are standing by his side, arguing that he was right to express his views and should not be condemned for it. The debate has sparked a heated discussion about the boundaries of political rhetoric and the implications of historical references in today’s political landscape.