A leading American progressive said Donald Trump was using “horrific … dehumanising and fascist rhetoric”, after the former president told supporters immigrants were invading the US and “poisoning the blood of our country”.
“This is horrific,” said Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on Monday.
“Donald Trump’s description of immigrants who are coming to the southern border is dehumanising and fascist rhetoric. These are dangerous lies, designed to villainise immigrants and make horrific policy seem somehow acceptable.
“This is a good reminder of why we can never return to any policies of Donald Trump. He is trying to erase immigrants from America. None of his policies are about reforming the immigration system in a way that recognis[es] that America is better for having immigrants here.”
Dominating Republican presidential primary polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats, Trump made the remarks at election rallies in New Hampshire and Nevada.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday, returning to a line used before.
“That’s what they’ve done. 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.”
In Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, he said: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion. Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.”
Academics, commentators and political opponents have been quick to link such rhetoric to that used by Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and other authoritarian leaders.
On Saturday, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor and author of the book Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, said Trump’s aim was to “dehumanise immigrants now so the public will accept [his] repression of them when [he] return[s] to office”.
But on Sunday, Marc Short, chief of staff to Mike Pence when Pence was vice-president to Trump, came to Trump’s defence.
“I think it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump has ever read Mein Kampf,” Short told Fox News, claiming Trump was instead using inflammatory language to distract critics while winning over voters.
Trump, however, has claimed to have owned Hitler’s memoir, which was published before his Nazi regime murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.
According to a 1990 profile in Vanity Fair, his first wife, Ivana Trump, told her lawyer her husband kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.
Trump claimed the book was actually Mein Kampf and was given to him by a Jewish friend. The friend, Marty Davis, said he gave Trump the book of speeches, not Mein Kampf – and that he wasn’t Jewish. Trump told his profiler, Marie Brenner: “If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”
Brenner asked: “Is Ivana trying to convince her friends and lawyer that Trump is a crypto-Nazi? Trump is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda.”
Trump’s apparent interest in Hitler has surfaced since. In 2021, the then Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender said Trump told John Kelly, his second of four White House chiefs of staff: “Hitler did a lot of good things.”
A spokesperson for Trump denied it.
