Trump Uses ‘Rhetoric of Adolf Hitler,’ Is ‘Threat to Democracy,’ Biden Campaign Warns

President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign is leaning in on former President Donald Trump’s extreme immigration comments that are similar to the rhetoric used by Nazi leader Adolph Hitler.

The comments about immigrants "poisoning the blood" of the country, which Trump made for a second time in New Hampshire over the weekend, are yet another chance for Biden’s campaign to highlight some of the former president’s most extreme rhetoric and cast him as a radical, something that Democrats have found considerable electoral success doing in recent years.

“This weekend, Donald Trump again invoked the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler saying immigrants were ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” said Michael Tyler, Biden campaign’s top spokesperson, said Tuesday. “Donald Trump is saying the quiet part out loud: He’s a threat to American democracy and every American’s personal freedoms.”

Trump sparked the Biden response during a speech in New Hampshire where, while not explicitly mentioning illegal immigration, he lamented what he said could be as many as 16 million undocumented immigrants in the United States who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

The comment is an echo of something Hitler said before World War II, where he said that German blood was being poisoned by Jews.

“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” Trump said on Saturday. “They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the in three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia. All over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at ‘em. They just come in.”

Trump has used this line before. He also did in an on-camera interview with the conservative National Pulse publication in September, leading to significant rebukes and attempted clean-up by Trump aides.

But his continued use of the phrase – along with hardline immigration policies – have made it easier for Biden’s campaign to paint Trump as a president who would have a more extreme administration in his second term than in his first four years in the White House.

That political strategy has been successful for Democrats in the past, including in 2022, when issues like abortion fed into a broader Democratic narrative about Republican extremism. Democrats went on to overperform in the midterms.

“Every time he says it, we are going to call it out,” Tyler said in a statement. “He’s going to echo the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, and we’re going to make sure that people understand just how serious that is every single time.”

- The Messenger's Marc Caputo contributed to this report.