Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a “Commit to Caucus” event for his supporters in Coralville, Iowa, U.S., December 13, 2023.Â
Vincent Alban | Reuters
The Biden campaign slammed former President Donald Trump for echoing Nazi sentiments with his repeated statements on Saturday night that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States.
“Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” Biden-Harris 2024 campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement on Saturday.
The Republican frontrunner most recently repeated the anti-immigrant remarks at a New Hampshire rally and in a Truth Social post Saturday night. But Trump has used this language nearly verbatim at least as early as September.
“It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, people are coming in with disease,” he said in a September interview with far-right political propagandist Raheem Kassam.
In his “Mein Kampf” manifesto, Hitler used similar rhetoric about blood poisoning, declaring it an existential threat to the Aryan race.
“President Trump gave a great speech,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said about the former president’s remarks. “Contrast that with mainstream media and academia at-large who have given safe haven for dangerous anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric.”
Trump’s inflammatory comments come as Republican hard-liners in Congress refuse to pass a Ukraine-Israel aid package until Democrats agree to stricter border policies. Republicans want to tighten asylum restrictions and have proposed policies like ankle bracelet monitors for people detained at the border.
Democrats have rebuked those policies, leading to an impasse that has held up an aid package with billions of dollars of support for Ukraine and Israel in their respective wars. With House members recessed for the holiday break, that funding will likely be postponed until 2024.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday was unfazed by Trump’s anti-immigrant remarks, doubling down on his commitment to more stringent border policy.
“If you’re talking about the language Trump uses rather than trying to fix it, that’s a losing strategy for the Biden administration,” Graham said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates said Sunday that “echoing the grotesque rhetoric of fascists and violent white supremacists” is an attack on American democracy.
In recent weeks, Trump has made several statements that appear to foreshadow his presidential approach in a second term.
At the same New Hampshire rally on Saturday night, Trump quoted authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin as an apparent character testimony: “Vladimir Putin, of Russia says that Biden’s – and this is a quote – politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy.”
He has also said that he would rule as a dictator on “day one” of his presidency.
Biden has previously called out the fact that the deadlocked Ukrainian aid package serves Russian foreign policy interests. After Republicans voted to block Ukraine aid, Biden quoted a Kremlin propagandist saying, “Well done, Republicans! That’s good for us.”
