The former president has now been pushing the “poisoning the blood of our country” line since early October. It was soon after when he started referring to Americans he doesn’t like as “vermin” he intends to “root out” — phrasing that also mirrored 1930s-era fascists.
True to form, the more pushback this generated, the less Trump cared.
The Republican’s defense, for lack of a better word, is that he didn’t know his rhetoric echoed Hitler’s. That might very well be true, though it’s utterly irrelevant for two key reasons.
The first is that Trump, told that his comments mirrored Hitler’s, kept using the same phrasing, which necessarily reflecting a degree of comfort with the language. It’s not as if he said, “Good lord, now that I know more about the history of such phrasing, I better stop.” On the contrary, he did the opposite.
The second is that the GOP frontrunner’s explanation is rooted in the idea that he adopted Hitler-like anti-immigrant rhetoric all on his own — which isn’t as compelling a defense as he seems to think.