Ex-President Donald Trump doubled down on his controversial remark that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the US despite comparisons to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Standing between two holiday trees topped with his campaign hats, Trump on Tuesday night echoed his own comments on immigrants from a few days prior that drew widespread criticism.
‘It’s crazy what’s going on. They’re ruining our country. And it’s true. They’re destroying the blood of our country,’ Trump said before about 1,000 supporters at his campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa.
‘That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country.’
Trump, aware of accusations that his words were inspired by Hitler’s manifesto more than a century ago, denied the claims.
‘They don’t like it when I said that, and I never read Mein Kampf. They said, “Oh, Hitler said that” – in a much different way,’ Trump said.
The former president had said at his rally in New Hampshire on Saturday: ‘You know, when they let – I think the real number’s like 15, 16million 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 repeated it that night in a post on his Truth Social platform.
‘Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation,’ he wrote. ‘They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions – from all over the world.’
Some have claimed parallels in Trump’s rhetoric to a phrase in Mein Kampf: ‘All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.’
Hitler’s beliefs on the ‘purity’ of Aryan blood led to Nazi Germany’s extermination of millions of Jews during World War II.
Trump on Tuesday added that immigrants from Africa, Asia, South America and ‘all over the world’ are being dumped at the US border and ‘could bring in disease’.
‘They’re destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country and we’re going to have to get them out,’ he said.
It is far from the first time that Trump has made contentious comments about immigrants.
In September, Trump posted a meme of alligators in water facing a fence and wrote, ‘new border security’ and ‘will work for food’. He suggested that the US’s border crisis could be a ‘problem solved’ by feeding migrants to gators.
Trump remains the clear frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination and some polls have him ahead of President Joe Biden.
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