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Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is hardly new, though by any fair measure, it appears to be getting worse.
It was in early October when the Republican first started using anti-immigrant rhetoric that echoed Adolph Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” The former president told a conservative outlet, in reference to migrants entering the United States, “Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from. ... It’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
After he started repeating the line with unnerving frequency, Trump was reminded in a recent interview that his language mirrored Hitler’s. The presumptive GOP nominee shrugged with indifference.
Around the same time, the Republican said in reference to migrants, “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” As The New York Times reported, he took such dehumanizing talk in a literal direction at an event yesterday.
Mr. Trump also used his speech, which lasted roughly 45 minutes, to defend his use of dehumanizing language to refer to immigrants accused of crimes. After referring to the man who the authorities say killed a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia in February, Mr. Trump said: “Democrats said please don’t call them ‘animals.’ I said, no, they’re not humans, they’re animals.”
He made the comments while flanked by police officers, as if Trump were an ally to law enforcement. He is not.
In the same pitch, Trump leaned into “bloodbath” rhetoric — it’s apparently no longer a word he’s applying to the automotive industry — and insisted that migrants are “coming into our country with contagious diseases.”
Naturally, the former president also insisted that foreign countries are deliberately sending “prisoners, murderers, drug dealers, mental patients and terrorists, the worst they have” to the United States, which remains a baseless claim for which there is no evidence.
In case this isn’t obvious, one of the reasons the Republican is relying on Hitler-like dehumanizing language is that it helps lay the groundwork for radical post-election policy measures. After all, if the White House doesn’t believe it’s dealing with human beings, it can justify all kinds of abusive conduct — including militarized mass deportations and detention camps.
But I also continue to believe Trump pushes such dangerous language because he expects an electoral benefit.
In recent years, even the most reactionary Republicans shied away from using Hitler-like rhetoric about immigrants, not because they found the language repulsive, but because they feared the electoral consequences: To embrace dehumanizing rhetoric toward immigrants was to risk a voter backlash, especially in Latino communities.
Trump has come to believe otherwise — and for good reason. He used racist rhetoric toward immigrants in 2016, for example, and fared better among Latino voters than Mitt Romney did four years earlier. He implemented ugly anti-immigrant policies while in office — even separating Latino children from their families and locking them in cages — and his share of the Latino vote went up, not down.
In 2024, he’s condemning migrants with literally dehumanizing language, all while promising, among other things, the most ambitious deportation policy in modern American history, and recent polling suggests none of this has hurt him with Latino voters at all.
Ron Brownstein has written quite a bit about this for The Atlantic, explaining that Trump has reason to believe he can “achieve the best of both worlds politically”: The Republican can energize xenophobic, far-right voters with his anti-immigrant agenda, while adding votes from immigrant communities that either don’t know or don’t care about the former president’s hate-filled vision.
In other words, Trump keeps pushing the envelope because he’s seen evidence suggesting he can do so with impunity — all of which suggests his agenda and his rhetoric is likely to get even worse.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.