Former President Donald Trump is pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail again as he took aim at people coming to the U.S. and “poisoning the blood of our country” during a rally on Saturday.
The former president, who has echoed the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in a recent speech pledging to “root out... vermin” political foes, ranted about immigrants to supporters in Durham, New Hampshire.
“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America... but all over the world,” Trump said of immigrants.
“They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody is even looking at them, they just come in and the crime is going to be tremendous, the terrorism is going to be.”
The latest remarks from Trump, who has said he’d be a “dictator” on “day one” of another presidential term, received swift criticism from a spokesperson for President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign.
“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.
MeidasTouch Network noted that the former president’s use of the “poisoning the blood” phrase is similar to one used by Hitler in “Mein Kampf” where the Nazi leader stated “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Trump previously used the phrase back in October during an interview with The National Pulse, adding that immigrants are coming into America “with disease” and “every possible thing that you could have.”
The remarks led to condemnation from Jonathan Greenblatt, the national director and CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, at the time as he tied the “toxic rhetoric” to inspiring mass shootings in Pittsburgh and El Paso in recent years.
Trump’s recent use of anti-immigrant rhetoric comes over one month since the New York Times reported that the former president – if elected to another term – plans to “scour the country for unauthorised immigrants,” annually deport people “by the millions” and build “huge” detention camps for detaining immigrants who await deportation.