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It’s been about two months since Donald Trump published a Veterans Day message in which he vowed to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country.” The phrasing had unsettling historical antecedents: Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini used eerily similar dehumanization rhetoric.
But the former president didn’t stop there. Soon after, the likely Republican nominee started peddling a line, with unnerving frequency, which said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing similar phrasing used by Hitler.
Would GOP voters endorse such talk? We didn’t have to wait too long to find out.
In mid-December, a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that 42% of likely GOP caucusgoers in the Hawkeye State said Trump’s “poisoning the blood” rhetoric made them more likely to support the former president’s candidacy, not less.
As striking as the results were, the survey was limited to Republicans in one state who were likely to participate in a nominating contest. The latest CBS poll asked a similar question to a broader group of participants, and the results were arguably even more discouraging.
As Donald Trump dominates the GOP nomination race and some of his inflammatory comments find favor with the party faithful, CBS News measured how the public feels about his “poisoning the blood” language. A striking number of voters agree with this description of immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally, and among Republicans, associating the remarks with Trump himself makes them even likelier to agree.
In the CBS News/YouGov survey, roughly half the respondents were asked about the “poisoning the blood” rhetoric without attributing the language to a specific candidate, while the other half were told it was Trump who made the comments.
According to the results, 72% of Republicans at the national level agreed with the anti-immigrant language when the phrasing wasn’t attributed to anyone, and that total climbed to 82% when respondents were told the former president was the one who said it.
On the surface, the polling data is disheartening for those who hoped to see GOP voters turn away from Hitler-like anti-immigrant rhetoric. But just below the surface, the survey results help shed light on why Trump chooses to go in such ugly directions in the first place.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, it might’ve been tempting to think the former president would’ve taken a rhetorical detour after being told that he was echoing, of all people, Hitler. That obviously didn’t happen: When Trump was told his phrasing was reminiscent of notorious fascists, he repeated the words and phrases anyway.
The polling helps explain why: Dictators and authoritarians have long used this rhetoric because they’ve found it to be effective. The words are toxic, but they work with much — too much — of their intended audience.
If GOP voters were repulsed by disgusting and divisive rhetoric, Trump would simply say something else. Indeed, the former president is afraid to use the word “vaccine” out loud precisely because he has heard his own followers boo him.
But as Republican politics becomes more radical, the party’s voters don’t jeer in response to words like “vermin” and “poisoning the blood”; they applaud such language and want to hear more of it.
“These statements are not just supposed to shock you,” Rachel recently explained on the show, “they’re supposed to work on you, to make you believe we need something new and extreme to deal with our terrible problems, if only for a little while — maybe just a temporary dictatorship. And these tactics have a terrible history of working really well.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.