Donald Trump said on Friday that he is “not a student of Hitler” while defending his comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Trump has been widely criticized for his remarks and was compared to Adolf Hitler who used the term “blood poisoning” in his manifesto Mein Kampf to criticize immigration and race mixing.
In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday Trump claims he is “not a student of Hitler” and has never read his works.
“I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works,” Trump told Hewitt. “They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way. It’s a very different kind of a statement. What I’m saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country.”
Trump denied reading Mein Kampf at a rally in Iowa this week. He reiterated this claim during the Friday interview and said he had no idea Hitler used the phrase.
“I never knew that Hitler said it, either, by the way,” Trump said. “And I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ They said I read ‘Mein Kampf.’ These are people that are disinformation, horrible people that we’re dealing with. I never read ‘Mein Kampf.'”
Even after learning that a similar phrase was used by Hitler, Trump kept using it throughout the interview.
“They are poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about immigrants. “And I’m not talking about a specific group, and I never read ‘Mein Kampf,’ and I have no idea what Hitler said other than I’ve seen on the news. And that’s a very entirely different thing than what I’m saying.”
He continued: “They’re pouring, they’re destroying our country. They’re coming in from every continent, and we have no idea, we have no idea who they are, what they represent. Are they from jails? Are they from prisons? And I will tell you, a big percentage of the people coming in are from prisons and from mental institutions and are terrorists. And we cannot let that … and that is poisoning our country.”
Asked for clarification on Trump using similar terms to Hitler, campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told NBC News that, “President Trump made clear he was talking about the terrorists, criminals, and people from insane asylums crossing the border, which is true since individuals on the terror watchlist and members of transnational gangs have illegally crossed.”
