Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, said Saturday that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” repeating language that previously drew criticism as xenophobic and echoing Nazi rhetoric.
Trump made the comments at a campaign event in New Hampshire, where he railed against the record number of migrants trying to cross the US border illegally. Trump has pledged to crack down on illegal immigration and limit legal immigration if he is elected to a second four-year term.
“They are poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump told a rally in the city of Durham attended by several thousand supporters, adding that in addition to South America, immigrants were also coming to the US from Asia and Africa. “They are pouring into our country all over the world.”
Trump used the same “blood poisoning” language during an interview with The National Pulse, a right-wing website, published in late September. It prompted a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League, whose leader, Jonathan Greenblatt, called the language “racist, xenophobic and despicable.”
Jason Stanley, a Yale professor and author of a book on fascism, said Trump's repeated use of that language was dangerous. He said Trump's words echoed the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, who warned about the poisoning of German blood by Jews in his political treatise “Mein Kampf.”
“He now uses this vocabulary repeatedly at meetings. Repeating dangerous statements increases its normalization and the practices it recommends,” Stanley said. “These are deeply concerning statements about the safety of immigrants in the US.”
In October, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung had dismissed criticism of the former president's language as “nonsensical,” arguing that similar language was common in books, news articles and on TV.
When asked for comment on Saturday, Cheung did not directly address Trump's comments, but instead referred to the controversies over the way American colleges have handled campus protests since Hamas's attack on Israel on October 7, in which he said the media and academia had “provided a safe haven for dangerous anti-Israel practices.” Semitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric that is both dangerous and alarming.”
The language “poisoning the blood of our country” did not appear in Trump's prepared remarks distributed to the media ahead of Saturday's event, and it was not clear whether his use of that rhetoric was planned or adopted on the spot .
Trump is the leading candidate for the Republican Party's 2024 presidential nomination and has made border security a key issue of his campaign. He vows to restore the harsh policies of his 2017-2021 presidency and implement new ones that will further restrict immigration.
President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic Party nominee, has tried to implement a more humane and orderly immigration policy but has struggled with record numbers of migrants, an issue seen as a vulnerability to his re-election campaign.
During his campaign, Trump has repeatedly used inflammatory language to describe the border issue and condemn Biden's policies. On Saturday, he recited the lyrics of a song he had reused to compare immigrants to deadly snakes.
If re-elected, Trump vowed to “stop the invasion of our southern border and begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)