Former President Donald Trump continues to pedal anti-immigration rhetoric, this time telling a crowd of supporters that they were wrecking the “blood” of the country, which many critics noted was similar to sentiments once shared by Adolf Hitler.
“It’s true that they’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing,” Trump said at an event in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday evening. “They don’t like it when I said that, and I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that in a much different way.’”
In the manifesto of the Nazi leader, who is responsible for the death of millions of innocent civilians, the dictator wrote, “All great cultures of the past perished, only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Despite the similarity in the rhetoric, Trump maintained that his recent talking points are nothing like that of Hitler.
Last Saturday, at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump said that illegal immigrants coming into the U.S. were “poisoning the blood of the country.”
The remarks were not taken kindly on Capitol Hill as the White House and Republicans in Congress were quick to call out the former President.
A spokesperson for President Joe Biden said that 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.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell went as far as to invoke his wife’s name, saying that Trump didn’t seem bothered when “he appointed Elaine Chao Secretary of Transportation.”
Chao, McConnell’s wife, is a Taiwanese-born immigrant who came to the United States when she was a child.
One of Trump’s GOP nominee challengers, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, was asked about Trump’s comments earlier this week.
Haley said that while the border needs to be secured and illegal immigration addressed, “we can do it without the rhetoric. The rhetoric was not necessary.”