“I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” Trump defends during a campaign rally

Donald Trump declared this Tuesday, December 19 that he had never read My Kampf of Adolf Hitler, and that he was not quoting the German dictator when he said that illegal immigrants in the United States “poisoned” And “destroyed the blood of America“. Comments made on several occasions which sparked strong criticism for their xenophobic character and their similarity to the words used at the time by Adolf Hitler.

“It’s true. They are destroying the blood of our country“, declared Donald Trump in front of a crowd of supporters during a campaign rally for the Republican nomination in Waterloo, Iowa. “They come from all over the world. They can be in good health or very unhealthy. They could bring diseases that would spread in our country“, he added. “They don’t like me saying that. I never read Mein Kampf,” he then defended himself, believing that the Nazi leader was speaking “in a very different way“.

“Poison the blood”

Besides the use of the rhetoric of “poison” at some recent rallies, Donald Trump has also used the phrase “poison the blood» during an interview given to the site The National Pulse, published in September. Faced with this controversy, an article from Vanity Fair dating from 1990 resurfaced: it was then said that the former president’s first wife, Ivana Trumpreportedly told her lawyer that her then-husband kept a collection of Hitler’s speeches in a bedside table.

Among the strong criticisms leveled against the candidate, Jonathan Greenblatt, who heads the association to fight against discrimination Anti-Defamation Leaguedescribed these remarks as “racist, xenophobic and despicable“. Before the rally in Iowa, Joe Biden’s campaign team released an email claiming that Donald Trump was echoing autocrats like Hitler and Mussolini when he said that immigrants “poison the blood of our country» and that he described his political enemies as “vermin“.