Trump rhetoric doubles down on migrants ‘poisoning’ U.S.

Former President Donald Trump, in an interview broadcast Sunday, doubled down on his description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country, language that echoes Adolf Hitler.

“Why do you use words like ‘vermin’ and ‘poisoning of the blood?’ ” media critic and interviewer Howard Kurtz asked on Fox News. “The press, as you know, immediately reacts to that by saying, ‘Well, that’s the kind of language that Hitler and Mussolini used.’ ”

“Because our country is being poisoned,” Mr. Trump responded.

He also repeated a claim he has made many times: that the migrants crossing the southern border are criminals flooding in from prisons and mental institutions.

Evidence does not support that. According to border officials, most migrants are families fleeing violence and poverty, and despite a few high-profile cases, data shows no increase in crime attributable to immigration. Crime rates, including that of murder, declined last year.

“We can be nice about it, we can talk about, ‘Oh, I want to be politically correct,’ ” Mr. Trump said. “But we have people coming in from prisons and jails, long-term murderers, people with sentences that the rest of their lives they’re going to spend in some jail in some country that many people have never even heard of. They’re all being released into our country.”

He went on: “These are people at the highest level of crime, and then you have mental institutions and insane asylums — I always say the difference is one is ‘Silence of the Lambs,’ you know, it’s a mental institution on steroids, OK? — and those mental institutions and insane asylums are being emptied out into the United States, and then you have terrorists pouring in at levels we have never seen before.”

Mr. Trump’s demonization of migrants has been a mainstay since he announced his first campaign in 2015 with a speech calling Mexicans rapists. But his rhetoric has become more extreme in his current campaign, and the dehumanization more explicit.

In addition to using the phrase “poisoning the blood,” which he started saying last fall, he has gone even further lately in demonizing migrants in his public comments. In a speech in Ohio on Saturday, he called migrants “animals” and said: “I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.”

He has similarly demeaned his political opponents, vowing in November to “root out” the “radicalleft thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

The nearly hourlong interview that Fox News aired Sunday covered a range of topics, including abortion, NATO and the potential TikTok ban that the House passed on a bipartisan basis last week and that Mr. Trump recently changed his position to oppose.

He said he didn’t want to ban TikTok because then more people would use Facebook, which he said was worse.