Former President Donald Trump returned to the campaign trail in New Hampshire on Saturday to argue that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” — repeating language that was denounced by President Joe Biden’s campaign as reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric.
“They’ve poisoned mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just the 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,” Trump said in front of a large crowd at the Whittemore Center at the University of New Hampshire.
The GOP frontrunner added that migrants were “pouring into our country. Nobody is even looking at them; they just come in, and the crime is going to be tremendous, the terrorism is going to be.”
During the speech, Trump also approvingly quoted Russian President Vladimir Putin and praised both Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whom he called “highly respected,” and North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un, whom he said is “fond of me.”
“Tonight Donald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy,” said Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson Ammar Moussa in a statement.
So far, the Trump campaign’s xenophobic and anti-immigrant rhetoric has surpassed even that of his 2016 campaign. The rhetorical escalation has been mirrored in the campaign’s policy proposals, with Trump vowing to execute an unprecedented crackdown on both legal and undocumented immigration if re-elected next year.
Much of Trump’s focus in the speech was on the 91 indictments he currently faces across four separate criminal cases. At one point, Trump quoted Putin to argue, without evidence, that the prosecutions were a politically motivated attack by the current president.
“Even Vladimir Putin says that Biden’s — and this is a quote — politically motivated persecution of his political rival is very good for Russia because it shows the rottenness of the American political system, which cannot pretend to teach others about democracy,” Trump said, referring to comments Putin made in September.
“We talk about democracy, but the whole world is watching the persecution of a political opponent that’s kicking his ass,” Trump added. “It’s an amazing thing. And they’re all laughing at us.”
Trump also took some time during the speech to attack his primary opponents, whom he called “insincere RINOs”—Republicans in name only—and “back-stabbing establishment losers.” Trump focused his ire on Nikki Haley, who received an endorsement from the state’s governor, Chris Sununu, last week and has been rising in the polls. Trump still maintains a significant double-digit lead nationally. A new poll in New Hampshire has Haley down 15 points in the Granite State.
“You know, with Nikki, they talk about the surge, and with DeSanctimonious, they talk about the bounce,” Trump said of his top two rivals. “They had been talking about it for the last six months, and the only one that had a surge and the only one that had a bounce is Trump. We had the big surge.”
“We are going to win the New Hampshire primary, then we are going to crush crooked Joe Biden next November,” he said. Trump won New Hampshire’s GOP primary twice, in 2016 and 2020, but lost the state in both of his general elections.
