“I am not a student of Hitler,” Trump told radio host
Former President Donald J. Trump on Friday reiterated and defended a much-criticized comment that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” dismissing criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was “not student of Hitler.”
In a radio interview, conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Mr Trump to explain his comment about “poisoning the blood” and asked him several times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Adolf Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto. , “My camp.”
The former president said he had no racist intent behind the statement. Then he added: ‘I know nothing about Hitler. I am not a student of Hitler. I have never read his works.”
According to news articles, biographers and books about his presidency, Mr. Trump has long had an interest in Hitler. A table next to his bed once held a copy of Hitler speeches called “My New Order,” a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had made. saw him leafing through it every now and then.
Mr. Trump once asked his White House chief of staff why he didn’t have generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders “completely loyal” to the Nazi dictator, according to a book about Trump’s presidency by Peter Baker, a reporter for the New York Times, and Susan Glasser. On another occasion, he told the same aide, “Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a New York Times reporter. in a 2021 book about Mr. Trump.
The former president has denied making either comment. In the radio interview on Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase – “poisoning the blood” – differed from passages in “Mein Kampf” in which Hitler uses “poison” and “blood” to explain his views on how outsiders ruined Aryan racial purity.
“They say he said something about blood,” Trump said. ‘He didn’t say it the way I said it either. By the way, it’s a completely different kind of statement.”
In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler wrote that great civilizations declined “because the originally creative race became extinct as a result of contamination of the blood.” At one point, Hitler links “the poison that has entered the national body” with an “influx of foreign blood.”
Trump’s political career and rise to the presidency have been inextricably linked to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his tone has only become more severe during his third term.
He told Mr Hewitt he meant “poisoning the blood” to refer to the immigrants from Asia, Africa and South America – although he did not name Europeans – who he broadly claimed came from prisons and mental institutions. He added that he was “not talking about a specific group,” but about immigrants from “all over the world” who “don’t speak our language.”
Mr. Trump directly addressed the comparisons between his comments and those of Hitler for the first time on Tuesday at a campaign event in Iowa, where he told hundreds of supporters that he had “never read Mein Kampf.”
The next day, the Biden campaign posted an image on social media that directly compared Mr. Trump to Hitler, using images of both of them and featuring three quotes from each of them.
Mr. Trump has also been accused by historians of repeating the language of fascist dictators, including Hitler. Last month he described his political opponents as “vermin” that needed to be exterminated.