poisonining the blood of our country

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xbomgf4UJ0
The Beat With Ari Melber [6PM] 12/18/2023 |BREAKING NEWS Today Dec 18, 2023

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‘Poisoning the blood of our country’: Trump delivers caustic attack on immigrants
If reelected, Trump has pledged to finish the border wall, reinstitute travel bans and launch mass deportation efforts.

Donald Trump speaks on stage.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally Dec. 16, 2023, in Durham, New Hampshire. | Reba Saldanha/AP

By OLIVIA ALAFRIZ

12/16/2023 06:03 PM EST

With a border deal hanging in the balance and the Iowa caucuses a month away, Donald Trump amplified his attack on immigrants at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” the former president said. “They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia.”


While in the White House, Trump sought to deter immigration by building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, building some 450 miles of fencing along the nearly 2,000-mile border, much of which replaced existing barriers. In addition to strict border security measures, his administration also implemented a travel ban for people from several predominantly Muslim countries.


If reelected, Trump has pledged to finish the border wall, reinstitute travel bans and launch mass deportation efforts. He has also pledged to end birthright citizenship for those born to immigrants living in the country illegally.

Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and James Lankford (R-Okla.) met with administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, on Saturday as they sought to forge a compromise on border security that could also unlock aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

But Trump was undeterred in his attack on immigrants Saturday.

“All over the world, they’re pouring into our country. Nobody is even looking at them, they just come in and the crime is going to be tremendous, the terrorism is going to be,” Trump said.

The Biden campaign later accused the former president of “parroting Adolf Hitler” in his remarks.


FILED UNDER: CONGRESS, EMPLO
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Trump doubles down, maintains immigrants are ‘destroying the blood of our country’
12/20/23

Trump doubles down, maintains immigrants are ‘destroying the blood of our country’
Trump doubles down, maintains immigrants are ‘destroying the blood of our country’
© Getty Images
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WATERLOO, Iowa — Former President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended his comments about migrants crossing the southern border “poisoning the blood” of America, and he reinforced the message while denying any similarities to fascist writings others had noted.

“I never read ‘Mein Kampf,’” Trump said at a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa, referencing Adolf Hitler’s fascist manifesto.


Immigrants in the U.S. illegally, Trump said Tuesday, are “destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country.”

In the speech to more than 1,000 supporters from a podium flanked by Christmas trees in red MAGA hats, Trump responded to mounting criticism about his anti-immigrant “blood” purity rhetoric over the weekend. Several politicians and extremism experts have noted his language echoed writings from Hitler about the “purity” of Aryan blood, which underpinned Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” before and during World War II.
As illegal border crossings surge, topping 10,000 some days in December, Trump continued to blast Biden for allowing migrants to “pour into our country.” He alleged, without offering evidence, that they bring crime and potentially disease with them.

Related video: Trump remarks about undocumented immigrants at N.H. rally sparks backlash (NBC News)
Tonight, less than a month before the Iowa caucuses,
NBC News
Trump remarks about undocumented immigrants at N.H. rally sparks backlash
“They come from Africa, they come from Asia, they come from South America,” he said, lamenting what he said was a “border catastrophe.”

Trump made no mention of the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday to disqualify him from the state’s ballot under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause, though his campaign blasted out a fundraising email about it during his speech.

Read more: Colorado Supreme Court bars Trump from state’s primary ballot under Constitution’s insurrection clause

The former president has long used inflammatory language about immigrants coming to the U.S., dating back to his campaign launch in 2015, when he said immigrants from Mexico are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”

But Trump has espoused increasingly authoritarian messages in his third campaign, vowing to renew and add to his effort to bar citizens from certain Muslim-majority countries, and to expand “ideological screening” for people immigrating to the U.S. He said he would be a dictator on “day one” only, in order to close the border and increase drilling.

In Waterloo on Tuesday, Trump’s supporters in the crowd said his border policies were effective and necessary, even if he doesn’t always say the right thing.

“I don’t know if he says the right words all of the time,” said 63-year-old Marylee Geist, adding that just because “you’re not fortunate enough to be born in this country,” doesn’t mean “you don’t get to come here.”

“But it should all be done legally,” she added.

It’s about the volume of border crossings and national security, said her husband, John Geist, 68.

“America is the land of opportunity, however, the influx — it needs to be kept to a certain level,” he said. “The amount of undocumented immigrants that come through and you don’t know what you’re getting, things aren’t regulated properly.”

Alex Litterer and her dad, Tom, of Charles City said they were concerned about migrants crossing the southern border, especially because the U.S. doesn’t have the resources to support that influx. But the 22-year-old said she didn’t agree with Trump’s comments, adding that immigrants who come to the country legally contribute to the country’s character and bring different perspectives.

Polling shows most Americans agree, with two-thirds saying the country’s diverse population makes the U.S. stronger.

But Trump’s “blood” purity message might resonate with some voters.

About a third of Americans overall worry that more immigration is causing U.S.-born Americans to lose their economic, political and cultural influence, according to a late 2021 poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Jackie Malecek, 50, of Waterloo said she likes Trump for the reasons that many people don’t — how outspoken he is and “that he’s a little bit of a loose cannon.” But she thought Trump saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood” took it a little too far.

“I’m very much for cutting off what’s happening at the border now. There’s too many people pouring in here right now, I watch it every single day,” Malecek said. “But that wording is not what I would have chosen to say.”

Malecek supports allowing legal immigration and accepting refugees, but she is concerned about the waves of migrants crossing the border who are not being vetted.

Sen. JD Vance, a Republican from Ohio, lashed out at a reporter asking about Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comments, defending them as a reference to overdoses from fentanyl smuggled over the border.

“You just framed your question implicitly assuming that Donald Trump is talking about Adolf Hitler. It’s absurd,” Vance said. “It is obvious that he was talking about the very clear fact that the blood of Americans is being poisoned by a drug epidemic.”

At a congressional hearing July 12, James Mandryck, a Customs and Border Protection deputy assistant commissioner, said 73% of fentanyl seizures at the border since the previous October were smuggling attempts carried out by U.S. citizens, with the rest being done by Mexican citizens.

Extremism experts say Trump’s rhetoric resembles the language that white supremacist shooters have used to justify mass killings.

Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, pointed to the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooter and this year’s Texas mall shooter, who he said used similar language in writings before their attacks.

“Call it what it is,” said Lewis. “This is fascism. This is white supremacy. This is dehumanizing language that would not be out of place in a white supremacist Signal or Telegram chat.”

Asked about Trump’s “poisoning the blood” comments, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell replied with a quip about his own wife, an immigrant, who was an appointee in Trump’s administration.

“Well, it strikes me that didn’t bother him when he appointed Elaine Chao Secretary of Transportation,” McConnell said.

Trump currently leads other candidates, by far, in polls of likely Republican voters in Iowa and nationwide. Trump’s campaign is hoping for a knockout performance in the caucuses that will deny his rivals momentum and allow him to quickly lock up the nomination. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has staked his campaign on Iowa, raising expectations for him there.

“I will not guarantee it,” Trump said of winning Iowa next month, “but I pretty much guarantee it.”

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Donald Trump on Tuesday seemed to defend himself against accusations that his rhetoric echoes that of Adolf Hitler by claiming he’d never read the Nazi leader’s manifesto, prompting skepticism, backlash and mockery online.

In the same breath, the former president also reiterated the anti-immigrant message that landed him in hot water.

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“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country,” he said at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa.

“They don’t like it when I said that,” he continued, referring to uproar after he made similar comments over the weekend. “And I never read ‘Mein Kampf.’ They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that in a much different way.’”

Critics, including the Biden campaign, Democrats and even some elected Republicans, had balked at Trump’s language at a rally on Saturday, specifically his reference to undocumented immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“Blood poisoning” was a theme in passages of “Mein Kampf,” used by Hitler to cast Jews and immigrants as impure.

Trump’s defense didn’t land so well.

;‘I just happen to use similar language as Hitler I didn’t read Hitler’ isn’t the defense he apparently thinks it is,” one X (formerly Twitter) user, @patdeklotz, wrote on Tuesday.

”When you ace the exam without even reading the assignment,” posted Eric Columbus, a former DOJ official and attorney for the Jan. 6 committee.



Others voiced skepticism, given certain past events.

Notably, a 1990 Vanity Fair article was resurfaced and shared widely this week, containing a detail about Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump, who reportedly told her attorney that her husband kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.

Trump has reportedly praised or expressed interest in Hitler to advisors several times over the years.

In recent months, he’s made headlines on several occasions for using dehumanizing language, including terms used by Hitler, to describe political opponents and immigrants.







Some commenters were blown away by the absurdity of Trump needing to offer that defense at all, and pointed to the fact he’s apparently going to keep on saying the same stuff anyway — even after admitting he knows where else it’s been used.





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Former US President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, on December 19, 2023. An appeals court in Colorado on December 19, 2023 ruled Donald Trump cannot appear on the state's presidential primary ballot because of his involvement in the attack on the Capitol in January 2021. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP) (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images) (Photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI via Getty Images)
Former US President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa, on December 19, 2023. An appeals court in Colorado on December 19, 2023 ruled Donald Trump cannot appear on the state's presidential primary ballot because of his involvement in the attack on the Capitol in January 2021. (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP) (Photo by KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images) (Photo: KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI via Getty Images)
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