Former President Donald Trump has ramped up his campaign rhetoric by taking it back to a terrifying time in global history — 1930s Germany, experts told Politico Saturday.
Trump's claims that migrants have "bad genes" and will "cut your throat" mimic the lies and feed on the prejudices that scholars say Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler exploited ahead of the Holocaust.
“What is so jarring to me is these are not just Nazi-like statements," said Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute. "These are actual Nazi sentiments."
Jones comment came in response to Politico's analysis of 20 recent Trump rallies that found not only that his rhetoric is dark — but it's much darker than it used to be, and more specific.
"He is no longer just talking about keeping immigrants out of the country, building a wall and banning Muslims from entering the United States," Politico wrote. "Trump now warns that migrants have already invaded, destroying the country from inside its borders, which he uses as a means to justify a second-term policy agenda that includes building massive detention camps and conducting mass deportations."
Trump in Aurora on Friday threatened to use the Alien Enemies Act to round up and remove migrants he claimed Vice President Kamala Harris "imported" from "the dungeons of the third world," Politico reported.
Earlier this campaign season, he claimed Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating people's pets — even after local officials told running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) it wasn't true.
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Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, told Politico she believed this was just the next step of a process that began when Trump mounted his first presidential campaign nearly a decade ago.
“He’s been taking Americans and his followers on a journey since really 2015...instilling hatred in a group, and then escalating,” said Ben-Ghiat.
“Now [immigrants are] animals who are going to kill us or eat our pets or eat us,” she continued. “That’s how you get people to feel that whatever is done to them, as in mass deportation, rounding them up, putting them in camps, is OK.”
Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to Politico that the American people cared less about rhetoric than they did the impact of immigration.
“President Trump will take action to deport Kamala’s illegal immigrants and secure the border on day one," she said. "That’s what Americans want to hear."
But Politico warned Trump's attacks are getting more specific when it comes to targeting groups of people, such as the immigrants who came to Springfield to pursue legal work, or the fake story he told about gang takeovers in Aurora.
Jones told the outlet Trump's increasingly threatening language has close similarities to Hitler's and, should Trump win the presidential election, he could take the nation to a similar place.
“Hitler used the word vermin and rats multiple times in Mein Kampf to talk about Jews," Jones said. "These are not accidental or coincidental references. We have clear, 20th century historical precedent with this kind of political language, and we see where it leads.”
