WOLFEBORO — At a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, former President Donald Trump praised authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and said immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” continuing his pattern of espousing autocratic and white nationalist politics.
Framing immigrants as tainting the “blood” of the nation follows the 2024 Republican presidential primary frontrunner describing his political enemies as “vermin” and saying he would be a dictator on “day one” of his next term at separate events earlier this month. The blood and vermin comments have been compared to dehumanizing Nazi propaganda and Adolf Hitler’s obsession with blood purity by historians, activists and Democrats, including the campaign of President Joe Biden.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said about halfway through his speech in Durham, N.H. “Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they are coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country, nobody’s even looking at them.”
After the speech, Trump doubled down in an all-caps post on social media, writing: “ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS POISONING THE BLOOD OF OUR NATION … WITHOUT BORDERS & FAIR ELECTIONS, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY.”
Biden’s campaign was quick to denounce the remarks, drawing a direct line between Trump’s language and Hitler’s genocidal rhetoric.
“Tonight 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,” campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement. “Trump is not shying away from his plan to lock up millions of people into detention camps and continues to lie about that time when Joe Biden obliterated him by over 7 million votes three years ago. He is betting he can win this election by scaring and dividing this country. He’s wrong.”
Hitler focused frequently on racist ideas about peoples he perceived as inferior tainting the blood of the idealized Aryan race. In his antisemitic manifesto “Mein Kampf,” he wrote “all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died off through blood-poisoning.”
“When Trump accuses people from Asia & Africa of poisoning America, why shouldn’t we fear not only Trump but the American majority who support him?” wrote Rev. Cornell William Brooks, a Harvard professor and former NAACP president, on social media. “At what point do Trump flags become warning signs for one’s physical safety? Alarmism or vigilance?”
Trump has promised “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” and the New York Times has reported that should he win back the White House, he plans to build large camps to detain people who enter the country illegally or to seek asylum.
One of his challengers in the primary, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, called Trump’s statements “disgusting” on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.
“What he’s doing is dog whistling to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strain from the economy and from the conflicts around the world. These dog whistles to blame it on people from areas that don’t look like us,” Christie said. “The other problem with this is the Republicans who are saying this is okay. Almost 100 members of Congress who have endorsed him. Nikki Haley, who this week said he is fit to be president.”
“You’re telling me that someone who says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country, someone who says Vladimir Putin is a character witness, is fit to be President of the United States?” Christie added.
Trump’s backers, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, dismissed his rhetoric and said the former president’s words mattered less than his hardline immigration policy prescriptions.
“We’re talking about language. I couldn’t care less what language people use, as long as we get it right,” Graham said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, before claiming: “We have chaos, and we need to create order.”
Trump’s praise of autocrats is not a new topic for the former president. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “is very nice” and “fond of me.” He praised Orbán, who has dismantled many of Hungary’s democratic institutions and spoke out against his country becoming “mixed race.” And he quoted Putin, roughly, as he tried to label Biden as the true authoritarian in the race.
“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,’” Trump said about halfway through his speech. “So you know, we talk about democracy, but the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking his a**. It’s an amazing thing.”
Trump faces 91 felony charges across four criminal cases, including two federal prosecutions brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who has an edict to operate independently of Department of Justice leadership. Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland have insisted they played no role in Trump’s indictments and arrests.
“They’re weaponizing law enforcement for high level election interference, because we’re beating them so badly in the polls. That’s what they do. They cheat,” Trump baselessly claimed.
Despite potentially facing four criminal trials next year, Trump’s supporters at the rally were only more committed to his candidacy. When he said he considers being indicted “a great badge of honor because I am being indicted for you,” the crowd burst into chants of “we love you.”
Trump also continued to spread falsehoods about his 2020 election loss and labeled prisoners convicted of crimes connected to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol as “hostages.” As of Dec. 6, over 1,200 people have been charged and around 700 have pleaded guilty to charges connected to that day, according to the Department of Justice. Another 138 were found guilty at trial. Hundreds were charged with violent crimes and leaders of a right-wing militia and street gang were sentenced to decades in prison for seditious conspiracy.
“When people who love our country protest in Washington, they become hostages unfairly imprisoned for long periods of time,” he said near the end of his remarks, backed by swelling music.
So far, his escalating authoritarian and white nationalist tendencies seem not to have hurt his standing in Republican presidential primary polling. The former president has a 50 percentage point lead in national polls of Republican primary voters and large, double-digit leads in the first three primary states with just weeks until the Iowa caucuses. And head-to-head polling pitting him against Biden shows a neck-and-neck contest, with Trump leading some surveys.
After the rally, Trump went to a UFC title fight in Las Vegas to watch welterweight fighter Colby Covington, a vocal supporter of his, take on world champion Leon Edwards. The broadcaster’s cameras followed Trump as he walked into the arena with UFC CEO Dana White and musician Kid Rock to loud cheers.
“Who is in the building, but former President Donald Trump,” UFC commentator Jon Anik said. “They are all rising inside T-Mobile Arena to pay their respects to the former leader of these United States of America.”
Edwards defeated Covington in the match; he sought to blame his loss on biased judging.
So when do we hear about how the whole democrap party is destroying the United States‽