One of the most overused ways to attack a political opponent in America is to liken them to Adolf Hitler. Former President Donald Trump bears the unusual distinction of rightfully earning the comparison. And as 2024 looms, his evocations of Nazism have become disturbingly verbatim.
During a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Trump went on a distinctly Hiterlian diatribe about the threats that immigrants pose to America. “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 subsequently doubled down on the claim on Truth Social, where he wrote, “Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.”
The “blood poisoning” narrative has officially gone from soft launch to hard launch.
Trump used similar language in an interview with a niche right-wing website in September. But this was the first time he used it at a rally. The “blood poisoning” narrative has officially gone from soft launch to hard launch.
Anybody in the United States who hears this language ought to find it immediately repellent. The basis for citizenship in a democracy is agreeing to a set of rules and civic values, not ethnic heritage. One need not be a scholar of democratic theory to see that describing Latino, Asian and African immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the body politic is predicated on racist bigotry, and stems from the premise that the U.S. is an ethnostate that belongs to white people.
But there’s a dark history to this idea — it’s the exact language used by Hitler to build the case for a Nazi regime and whip up popular support…
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