Former President Donald Trump denied repeating Nazi rhetoric on Tuesday after once again accusing undocumented immigrants of destroying the blood of America.
During a campaign rally in Iowa, Trump, the front-runner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, doubled down on his anti-immigrant remarks before refuting that they had been inspired by the manifesto of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country,” Trump said. “They don’t like it when I say that. And I never read Mein Kampf.”
Trump went on to argue that Hitler’s anti-immigrant comments were made “in a much different way.”
Hitler wrote in 1925 that “all great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Trump initially received widespread condemnation following a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday where he made a similar statement.
“They let—I think the real number is 15, 16 million people into our country. When they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
Shortly after in an all-caps statement on Truth Social, Trump again mentioned the term “poisoning” when referring to immigration.
“ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION IS POISONING THE BLOOD OF OUR NATION. THEY’RE COMING FROM PRISONS, FROM MENTAL INSTITUTIONS — FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD. WITHOUT BORDERS & FAIR ELECTIONS, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
In response to Trump, the campaign for President Joe Biden sent out an email comparing him to both Hitler and fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
“Donald Trump is parroting autocrats like Hitler and Mussolini, claiming that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’ and calling his political enemies ‘vermin,’” the campaign email said.
Yet Trump’s denial on Tuesday of ever having read Hitler’s writings is being called into question. A resurfaced article written by Vanity Fair in 1990 detailed how Trump’s first wife had reportedly told her lawyer that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside table.
It also revived a favorite meme of the internet, where someone insisting something isn’t true usually means it isn’t.
Others joked if he hadn’t, it was downright impressive.
Trump’s comments come as numerous polls show him defeating not only his fellow Republicans but Biden as well. On Tuesday, however, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump would be removed from the state’s ballot. The ruling argued that the 14th Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists holding public office barred Trump from running due to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
