Former president
Donald Trump denied comparisons to dictators such as Adolf Hitler on Tuesday, as he repeated his claim that undocumented immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”
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“It’s true, they’re destroying the blood of our country. ... They don’t like it when I said that,” he said.
“I never read ‘Mein Kampf,’” Trump said, referring to Hitler’s political manifesto. “They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that.’ In a much different way. Now they’re coming from all over the world. People all over the world. We have no idea. They could be healthy, they could be very unhealthy, they could bring in disease that’s going to catch on in our country. But they do bring in crime.”
Trump’s remarks, delivered here at a Commit to Caucus event, come as he has faced backlash from historians, civil rights advocates, immigrant rights groups, some Republicans and the Biden campaign for suggesting undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” That rhetoric has drawn comparisons to Hitler’s fixation on blood purity.
Despite those comparisons, Trump has repeated a similar statement several times, including at a campaign event in New Hampshire this past weekend and in a post on Truth Social, in which he said that undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for strongmen. According to a
Vanity Fair article from 1990, Ivana Trump told her lawyer that Trump read “My New Order,” a book of Hitler’s speeches. Trump at the time said he was given a copy of “Mein Kampf” by his friend Marty Davis, who he said was Jewish. Trump later said:
“If I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them,” according to Vanity Fair.
In her book “Confidence Man,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman wrote that Davis “was not Jewish and gave Trump the book ‘My New Order’ because he thought he would find it ‘interesting.’”
