Trump, attacked for emulating Hitler, says he never read ‘Mein Kampf’
Former President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his widely condemned comment that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” dismissing criticism that the language reflected Adolf Hitler by pointing out that he never wrote the autobiographical manifesto the Nazi dictator had read.
Mr. Trump did not repeat the exact phrase, which has drawn criticism since he first uttered it in an interview with a right-wing website and then repeated it at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday.
But he said in a speech in Iowa on Tuesday night that undocumented immigrants from Africa, Asia and South America were “destroying the blood of our country,” before referring to his earlier comments.
‘That’s what they do. They are destroying our country,” Mr. Trump continued. ‘They don’t like it when I say that. And I never read ‘Mein Kampf’. They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’”
He added that Hitler said it “in a completely different way,” without making his meaning clear.
Undocumented immigrants, he added, “can be healthy. They can be very unhealthy. They can carry diseases that will spread in our country.” And he said again that they were “destroying the blood of our country” and “destroying the fabric of our country.”
Mr. Trump and his campaign have dismissed comparisons between his comment and Hitler’s language, using the words “poison” and “blood” to disparage those Hitler viewed as a threat to the purity of the Aryan race.
In a chapter of ‘Mein Kampf’ entitled ‘Race and People’, Hitler wrote: ‘All the great civilizations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race became extinct due to contamination of the blood.’ In another passage he links “the poison that has entered the national body” with an “influx of foreign blood.”
Trump’s comment was widely criticized as racist and xenophobic, and the Biden administration has recently drawn more attention to the comparison.
Some Senate Republicans also criticized the comment this week, including Mitch McConnell, the body’s top Republican. But others embraced the language, including Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, who said it was “objectively and clearly true” that “illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country.”
Trump has made anti-immigrant sentiment a centerpiece of his past political campaigns, and as he runs for the White House for a third time, his tone has become harsher. He was also accused of echoing the dehumanizing language of fascist dictators, including Hitler, when he described his political opponents as “vermin” to be exterminated.
In his speech on Tuesday, he again claimed that leaders of unspecified countries were emptying prisons and mental institutions and sending their residents to the United States, a broad claim for which there is no clear evidence.
Mr Trump also used his speech to defend America’s Christians, who he said were under attack by Democrats. Standing between two Christmas trees, Mr. Trump said he would create a “federal task force to combat anti-Christian bias” to investigate any “discrimination, harassment and persecution.” He added: “They are going after Christians in America.”