President Joe Biden’s campaign said Donald Trump “parroted Adolf Hitler” after the former president said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“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-Harris 2024 spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement to Politico.
Trump made the comment while speaking at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire on Saturday.
“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 later doubled down in an all-caps post on his social media website Truth Social, writing: “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”
According to Reuters, Trump used similar language about migrants in an interview earlier this year. The CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League Jonathan Greenblatt, called his comments at the time “racist, xenophobic and despicable.”
The term “blood poisoning” was used by Hitler in Mein Kampf to criticize immigration and race mixing.
“All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in his 1925 book.
