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 reiterated the anti-immigrant message that landed him in hot water.
“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 wrote on Tuesday.
“When you ace the exam without even reading the assignment,” posted Eric Columbus, a former DOJ official and one-time attorney for the Jan. 6 committee.
Others voiced skepticism, given certain past events.
Notably, a 1990 Vanity Fair article resurfaced and was 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.
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.
The fact that he knows what Mein Kampf is, but had to have Gen. Kelly explain to him the significance of Pearl Harbor, tells you a lot. https://t.co/yvRuRzaF28
— George Conway (gtconway3 on Threads—try it!) (@gtconway3d) December 20, 2023
Some commenters were blown away by the absurdity of Trump needing to offer that defense at all and pointed to the fact that he’s apparently going to keep on saying the same stuff anyway — even after admitting he knows where else that ideology has been used.
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