Former US President Donald Trump has once again used inflammatory and divisive language to attack immigrants and his political opponents. Speaking at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday, he repeated his claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”, a phrase that has been widely denounced as echoing the rhetoric of white supremacists and Nazis.
“They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America … but all over the world. They’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” he said.
Trump, who is facing 91 criminal charges, had previously used the same phrase in October, when he also called sections of American society he dislikes “vermin” and vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.
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His remarks were condemned by the current president Joe Biden, who said Trump was using language that was heard in Nazi Germany.
“Trump also recently talked about, ‘The blood of America is being poisoned’ … Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany,” Biden said at the time.
Classic Trump
Trump, who has not conceded his defeat in the 2020 election, has been campaigning for a comeback in 2024. According to CNN, he plans to implement even more draconian immigration policies than he did in his first term, when he separated children from their parents at the border and put them in cages. His new proposals reportedly include detaining undocumented immigrants who already live in the US in camps, allegedly to prepare them for deportation.
The former president also said he would “restore and expand” his travel bans to the US, which he imposed in 2017 on several Muslim-majority and African countries, and that he would “implement strong ideological screening for all illegal immigrants”.
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His latest speech drew criticism from the journalist Mehdi Hasan, who said on Saturday, “Classic Trump- say something crazy outrageous, neo-Nazi-like and it gets headlines, creates outrage.”
“So wait a little. Then say it again, no one notices, no coverage, and it gets normalized and mainstreamed.”
“Let’s be clear- migrants ‘poisoning the blood’ is Hitler rhetoric,” he added.
