Trump doubles down on migrants ‘poisoning’ country

Former President Donald J. Trump doubled down on his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country in an interview that aired Sunday, language that echoes Hitler.

“Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘blood poisoning’?” asked Howard Kurtz, the media critic and interviewer, on Fox News. “As you know, the press immediately responds to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’”

“Because that’s what our country is be poisoned,” Mr Trump responded.

He also repeated a claim he has made many times: that the migrants crossing the southern border are criminals pouring in from prisons and mental institutions.

Evidence doesn’t support that. Border officials say most migrants are families fleeing violence and poverty, and despite some high-profile cases, data shows crime has not increased as a result of immigration. Crime rates, including murder, fell last year.

“We can be nice about it, we can talk about ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct,’” Trump said. “But there are people coming out of jails and prisons, long-term murderers, people with sentences that will see them spend the rest of their lives in some prison in a country that many people have never heard of. They will all be released into our country.”

He continued: “These are people at the highest levels of crime, and then you have mental institutions and insane asylums – I always say the difference is there’s one ‘Silence of the Lambs’, you know, it’s a mental institution on steroids, OK? – and those mental institutions and insane asylums are being emptied across the United States, and then terrorists are coming in at levels we’ve never seen before.”

Trump’s demonization of migrants has been a mainstay since he announced his first campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexicans rapists. But his rhetoric has become more extreme in his current campaign, and the dehumanization has become more explicit.

In addition to using the phrase “blood poisoning,” which he started saying last fall, he has recently gone even further in demonizing migrants in his public comments. In a speech in Ohio on Saturday, he called migrants “animals” and said, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people’ in some cases.” I don’t think they’re people.”

He has similarly humiliated his political opponents by promising in November to root out the “radical left-wing criminals who live like vermin within the borders of our country.”

The nearly hour-long interview that Fox News aired Sunday touched on a range of topics, including abortion, NATO and the potential TikTok ban that the House passed on a bipartisan basis last week and that Mr. Trump recently changed his position to to oppose that.

He said he didn’t want to ban TikTok because it would cause more people to use Facebook, which he said was even worse. He denied that his reversal was related to his recent meeting with a billionaire who has a stake in the company that owns TikTok.

He said he would decide on abortion proposals “fairly quickly”; he has said privately that he supports a 16-week ban, and his allies want him to take executive or administrative action to effectively ban abortion without going through the legislative process. He gave no details in the interview, saying Democrats supported third-trimester abortions (which make up less than 1 percent of procedures) and “after-birth” abortions (which do not exist).

Weeks after saying he would encourage Russia to invade NATO members that were not paying the alliance enough, he falsely claimed that as a result, “countries that were late in their payments or did not pay at all have paid.” The alliance’s payment structure is not working as Mr. Trump described — some countries are not meeting unofficial commitments to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense, but no one owes dues to the alliance — and nothing substantive has changed since he took over made comments. last month.

Trump also repeated his most perennial lie: that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

“You can scrap this if you want,” he said, “but the election was rigged.”