Snopes: Did Trump Echo Hitler with Remark About Migrants: 'Poisoning the Blood of Our Country'?

[Eugene]

Source: Snopes

Did Trump Echo Hitler with Remark About Migrants: 'Poisoning the Blood of Our Country'?

"Nobody has ever seen anything like we're witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country," Trump said in a September 2023 interview.

Jordan Liles
Published Oct 4, 2023

On Oct. 4, 2023, Medhi Hasan, the host of MSNBC's "The Medhi Hasan Show," posted on X that former U.S. President Donald Trump said that undocumented immigrants coming into the U.S. were "poisoning the blood of our country." Hasan called Trump's remark "a straight-up white supremacist [or] neo-Nazi talking point."



We reached out to the Trump campaign by email to ask about this matter but did not hear back after several hours.

In this story, we'll take a look at the transcript of Trump's remarks, relevant passages from "Mein Kampf" by Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler and briefly touch on the other claims made by the former president during the same interview.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/10/04/trump-poison-blood-quote/

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The article leaves it up to the reader to form a conclusion.

[canetoad]

1. It doesn't matter

If he 'Echoed Hitler' or not. The whole 'blood' issue was foremost with the Nazis to the point of documenting how 'pure' your blood could be to be considered an aryan.

[muriel_volestrangler]

2. There's other crazy stuff in that interview - not so fascist, but showing stupidity and dementia

"And when they send up those caravans, and I had it ended, we had the safest border in the history of our country, meaning the history, over the last 80 years. Before that, I assume it was probably not so bad. There was nobody around."

"There was nobody around" before 80 years ago??? He thinks the nations of Mexico, and all the ones further south, just sprang into existence 80 years ago? He thinks there wasn't appreciable immigration into the USA before 1943? I'm not surprised he implies that white people like him have always been in the USA - that's the white supremacist in him - but I really thought he'd have an idea about what happened more than 5 years before he was born.

[vanlassie]

4. He obviously means anything that happened before he was born

was of no importance. Nobody around!

[ShazzieB]

6. Sounds consistent with his extreme narcissism.

A narcissist like Trump sees himself as the center of the universe. Other people are like stage props to him; nothing really matters to him except himself and his enormous ego. It makes sense that anything that happened before he was born would hold little meaning for him.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

11. People have been living, working and playing on both sides

Of the Rio Grande ever since the Spanish set up shop in Rio Bravo, near modern-day Brownsville/Matamoros, in the 1520s, and some 85 years before the Jamestown settlement.

If it weren't for the official crossings, the border to most of the locals would mean as much as crossing the Mississippi is to the rest of the US (less actually, since the Rio Grande isn't nearly so wide). That's because the locals don't really see the river as a boundary, but as an ordinary geographical feature like hills or forests, and one they wouldn't think much of if the US weren't being total arseholes about it.

I was such a person for a summer. I house-sat for a guy in Mexico, but had a temp job on the US side, requiring me to cross the river 2X a day. Even with the border guards nonsense, it was less of a hassle than any of my California work commutes have ever been. I never felt like I was moving between countries, only going over a bridge with toll booths, same as any I used in the Bay Area. Weirder toll booths, but toll booths all the same.

The only "different" crossing was at Los Ebanos, because it employs a rope-pulled ferry rather than a bridge. As soon as I heard about it, I had to check it out while I was down there. I'm a geek about old-school holdovers like that.

Of course, I was there in the 90s. I'm sure that trip is a complete PITA now that the US side requires a passport for entry. Los Ebanos may actually be the fastest and least stressful crossing these days.

[TreasonousBastard]

3. Himmler made speeches talking about keeping blood "pure" so.

I assume it was Nazi talking point.

[canetoad]

5. He certainly did

But Himmler was the qanon of his day. He believed in all sorts of strange stuff.

[Vinca]

7. Wasn't there a report at one time about Trump keeping a copy of "Mein Kampf" by his bed?

He seems to view himself as a Hitler wannabe.

[ShazzieB]

9. It was a collection of Hitler's speeches.

Still Hitler either way, of course,

[hlthe2b]

8. The late Ivana claimed he kept a copy of Hitler's speeches on the nightstand. I'd presume that he's

read (to the extend he reads anything) "Mein Kampf" as well.

[ExWhoDoesntCare]

12. I doubt he's read much of anything

He's had someone tell him what various parts say, and he looks at them like we would at the Rosetta Stone after a history or art teacher told us what it said. But we can't read it to save our lives.

I don't think the guy can read. If he has any capability for it at all, it's maybe at the functionally illiterate level. I saw that video deposition of him handed a paper and asked to read from it. When people who know how to read get a piece of paper their eyes do a distinctive "z" pattern--across, then diagonally down to cross again, just like the letter z. Even people who have poor vision do that. He looked at the page like he was looking at a picture as a whole, shoved it aside and lied that he couldn't read it because he didn't have his glasses.

Liar. Like I said, even people with poor vision will do the z scan, to see if they can make out the text without glasses. He did not do that z scan at all.

He's illiterate, I'm guessing from dyslexia that no one ever bothered to look for. Granted, it wasn't as well-known when he was a kid, but it wasn't unknown in the 50s, either. He certainly didn't have a book-loving parent like his age cohort, George W Bush. Whatever else one can say about her, Barbara Bush cared that her kid was struggling to read, and, very much to her credit, refused to take it lying down. TFG's family didn't care in the least about books or reading, only money and domination. Even if they'd had him diagnosed, they would have seen dyslexia as a weakness every bit as shameful and unforgivable as alcoholism or compulsive gambling.

The guy was doomed by his nature and his nurture, from birth.

[gratuitous]

10. Yeah, that's a real head-scratcher

After all the "good people" at Charlottesville were chanting about blood and soil and that Jews will not replace them, but that could mean anything. In today's Republican world, looking back at the roots of Nazism makes them feel bad about their white supremacist ways. So don't do that! Ignore the parallels and the obvious appropriation of Nazi philosophy (at least it's an ethos!) because that makes Republicans look bad.

[Deminpenn]

13. The way Trump talks is like a gumball machine

except instead of different colors, the gumballs are various random ideas he's heard somewhere that pop out and are then strung together in a minimally coherent rambling answer.