Trump Doubles Down on Hitler’s Rhetoric, Denies Reading ‘Mein Kampf’
Donald Trump accused immigrants of “destroying the blood of our country” during a campaign rally in Iowa Tuesday, repeating hateful rhetoric echoing white supremacists and genocidal Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country. They don’t like it when I said that — and I never read Mein Kampf,” said Trump, referencing Hitler’s manifesto. “They could be healthy, they could be very unhealthy, they could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country, but they do bring in crime, but they have them coming from all over the world,” the former president continued. “And they’re destroying the blood of our country. They’re destroying the fabric of our country.”
Hitler, who repeatedly compared Jewish people to a blood poison within German society, wrote in Mein Kampf that “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” and blamed Jews and other “undesirable” groups for said contamination.
When speaking at Whittemore Center Arena on the campus of University of New Hampshire in Durham on Saturday, Trump accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” adding, “They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia — all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.”
The former president’s return to Iowa on Tuesday marked his fourth trip to the state in less than a month as his campaign operation ramps up efforts to take the primary early by declaring a sweeping victory in the Hawkeye state.
“Other candidates are betting on turning out existing caucusgoers,” a senior Trump campaign official told the outlet when explaining the campaign strategy. “Our focus is on finding and creating first-time caucusgoers.”
Trump’s vile rhetoric has amped up as elections approach, the ex-president has now declared twice that he’ll act as a “dictator” should he be reelected — clarifying he’d only need such powers on “Day One.”
Prior to Tuesday’s Iowa stop, Trump held another Commit to Caucus rally in Reno, Nevada and vowed to “shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI and DHS” in order to “stop the invasion of our country.”
His remarks follow Rolling Stone’s reporting last week that Trump plans to send vast numbers of U.S. troops — potentially “hundreds of thousands” — to close the southern border and build a network of immigrant detention camps should he serve a second term.
Despite Trump’s long history of fawning over dictators, Republicans have attempted to soften the ex-president’s hateful speech with myriad feeble excuses.
Fox News host Brian Kilmeade insisted Monday morning that Trump “was talking about the border. He was talking about people coming from other countries, coming from prisons.”
“He’s just trying to say we want to keep America, America,” Kilmeade added, “and they tried to say that this language was the problem.”
Elsewhere, Marc Short, ex-chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, told Fox News that he felt it was “highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read Mein Kampf.”
Trump has reportedly acknowledged that he was once gifted a copy of Hitler’s book. According to his ex-wife, Ivana Trump, the former president kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet at his bedside and would read them.
