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, he spent the weekend repeating the line, both at rallies and by way of his social media platform.

Trump apparently came to realize that he was echoing notorious fascists, so at his last Iowa rally, the former president offered new reassurances. NBC News reported:

Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday doubled down on his widely criticized comments about immigration by suggesting that people crossing the border illegally into the United States are “destroying the blood of our country.” … Trump brushed off the comparison to Hitler during Tuesday’s event in Iowa, saying that he “never read Mein Kampf,” and that Hitler made the comment “in a much different way.”

The way the candidate delivered the line, he apparently thought his audience would feel better about him using Nazi-like rhetoric if he dismissed the idea that he’d read Hitler’s book.

There are a few angles to this that are worth keeping in mind.

First, it’s very easy to believe that Trump hasn’t read “Mein Kampf,” given that the former president isn’t much of a reader. I’m hard-pressed to imagine him reading any book from cover to cover. But it’s also irrelevant: Nearly a century later, it’s not difficult to know the core elements of the book without having read it.

Indeed, Trump apparently has some familiarity with the text: He told his Iowa audience that when Hitler referenced immigrants poisoning German blood, the monster made the comment “in a much different way” — suggesting some familiarity with the text.

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Second, in 1990, Trump told Vanity Fair his “friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew,” adding that his friend thought he’d find it “interesting.” (For his part, Davis said he wasn’t Jewish and he’d given Trump a book about Hitler, not “Mein Kampf.”)

But even if we put those relevant details aside, let’s not miss the forest for the trees. As 2023 comes to a close, American politics has reached the point at which the Republican Party’s likely presidential nominee echoes Adolf Hitler with such frequency that he felt the need to deny publicly that he’d read “Mein Kampf.”

This is where we find ourselves as a nation. This is what the GOP has come to.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but when an American presidential candidate finds it necessary to tell the public that he hasn’t read Hitler’s book, that ought to be a flashing red light that there’s something fundamentally wrong with his candidacy for national office.