Former President Donald Trump speaks at the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C., on June 24, 2023.Photo:Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Speaking to a crowd in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday — just one month out from the state’s primary election — Trump said, “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.”
He continued: “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.”
Hitler used similar phrasing in his antisemitic 1925 manifestoMein Kampf, which laid out an overtly racist political ideology and said, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
The “poisoning” language was not included in Trump’s original script for Saturday’s rally,Reutersreports. But hours after the speech, the former president — who also seemingly praised authoritarian leadersVladimir PutinandKim Jong Unduring the event — doubled down on his choice of phrasing, asserting on Truth Social that “illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”
PEOPLE reached out to Trump’s campaign spokesperson for comment.
Former President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower en route to a Manhattan courthouse to answer to criminal charges on April 4, 2023.CJ GUNTHER/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley, who authored books titledHow Propaganda WorksandHow Fascism Works,told Reuters that Trump’s recent language could have harmful consequences, particularly in terms of stoking xenophobia.
“Repeating dangerous speech increases its normalization and the practices it recommends,” he said. “This is very concerning talk for the safety of immigrants in the U.S.”
Earlier this month, Trump told Sean Hannity that he would briefly be a “dictator” if elected to another term in 2024, saying that he would spend his first day in the White House “closing the border” and “drilling, drilling, drilling” before acting like a president again.
Trump has made border security a prominent theme of his reelection campaign, pinning a surge in illegal border crossings on PresidentJoe Bidenas he uses increasingly inflammatory language to characterize immigrants lacking permanent legal status.
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source: people.com
