It was in early October when Donald Trump first started using anti-immigrant rhetoric that echoed Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The former president told a conservative outlet, in reference to migrants entering the United States, “Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. … It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
The rhetoric, not surprisingly, sparked immediate pushback, but the Republican front-runner, confident that the GOP base would embrace such rhetoric, quickly added the phrasing to his repertoire. Indeed, as he repeats the line with unnerving frequency, it’s become a staple of Trump’s script.
Over the weekend, the Republican doubled down on the phrasing in provocative ways. The New York Times reported:
“Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood’?” Howard Kurtz, the media critic and interviewer, asked on Fox News. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’” “Because our country is being poisoned,” Mr. Trump responded.
In other words, told explicitly that he was echoing Hitler, Trump reiterated his support for the phrasing anyway, before proceeding to peddle discredited claims about those trying to enter the United States.
Trump on criticism that he's using the same rhetoric as Hitler when he calls migrants "vermin": "I didn't know that, but that's what they say."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 17, 2024
He then doubles down on the Nazi rhetoric. pic.twitter.com/oBnlFEFA2m
The Fox interview aired the day after the presumptive GOP nominee headlined a campaign rally in Ohio, where he took his dehumanization rhetoric in a rather literal direction.
“I don’t know if you call them people,” Trump told supporters at a rally near Dayton, Ohio. “In some cases they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say.”
Decent people might very well respond that way because it is, in fact, a terrible thing to say.
"I don't know if you call them people … these are animals" — Trump on undocumented immigration pic.twitter.com/HVO7AqHDih
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 16, 2024
Of course, given the larger context, the former president’s rhetoric is only part of a radical vision. The Republican also intends to target immigrants with militarized mass deportations and detention camps if voters reward him with a second term.
What matters most in a story like this is the real-world impact on people, their families, and their communities, but I’m also struck by a question that hangs overhead: Why does Trump expect to benefit politically from this?
Part of the problem, of course, is polling suggesting that the Republican base is fully on board with the candidate’s rhetoric and agenda. As we’ve discussed, if GOP voters were repulsed by disgusting and divisive rhetoric, Trump would simply say something else. Indeed, the former president is afraid to use the word “vaccine” out loud precisely because he has heard his own followers boo him.
But as Republican politics becomes more radical, the party’s voters don’t jeer in response to words and phrases such as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood”; they applaud such language and want to hear more of it. The other relevant dimension to this, however, is an apparent shift among Latino voters. In recent years, even the most reactionary Republicans shied away from using Hitler-like rhetoric about immigrants, not because they found the language repulsive, but because they feared the electoral consequences: To embrace dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants was to risk a voter backlash, especially in Latino communities. Trump has come to believe otherwise — and for good reason. He used racist rhetoric toward immigrants in 2016, for example, and fared better among Latino voters than Mitt Romney did four years earlier. He implemented ugly anti-immigrant policies while in office — even separating Latino children from their families and locking them in cages — and his share of the Latino vote went up, not down. In 2024, he’s condemning migrants with language that echoes Hitler, all while promising, among other things, the most ambitious deportation policy in modern American history, and recent polling suggests none of this has hurt him with Latino voters at all. Ron Brownstein has written quite a bit about this for The Atlantic, explaining that Trump has reason to believe he can “achieve the best of both worlds politically”: The Republican can energize xenophobic, far-right voters with his anti-immigrant agenda, while adding votes from immigrant communities that either don’t know or don’t care about the former president’s hate-filled vision. In other words, Trump keeps pushing the envelope because he’s seen evidence suggesting he can do so with impunity — all of which suggests his agenda and his rhetoric is likely to get even worse. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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