Vice President Harris on Tuesday slammed former President Trump’s recent comments that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the country, arguing it is similar to rhetoric used by Adolf Hitler.
Harris appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s MSNBC show, where she was asked about Trump’s comments in the context of her own background being biracial and the daughter of immigrants.
“I was raised knowing that there will be some people who will use their voice in a way that is meant to dehumanize, meant to suggest that the vast majority of us don’t have anything in common, when, in fact, the vast majority of us have more in common than what separates us,” Harris said.
“And I would interpret it, I think, then as I do now, which is, it is language that is meant to divide us,” she continued. “It is language that I think people have rightly found similar to the language of Hitler. And I think it’s just critically important that we remind each other, including our children, that the true measure of the strength of a leader is based not on who they beat down, but who they lift up.”
Harris’s comments make her the highest ranking Democratic official to date to publicly compare Trump’s rhetoric about immigrants to Hitler, joining the Biden campaign and White House aides.
Trump on Saturday held a rally in New Hampshire at which he claimed immigrants were “pouring into” the United States and “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“All over the world they’re coming into our country. From Africa, from Asia, all over the world,” Trump said, suggesting it would lead to increases in crime and terrorism.
The same night, Trump wrote in all capital letters on Truth Social: “Immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation.”
The “poisoning the blood” remark is not the first time Trump has used that line, which the Anti-Defamation League and others have said echoes the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler, who wrote in “Mein Kampf” that German blood was being poisoned by Jews.
Trump’s allies have largely brushed away the comments, arguing that border security is a real concern for many Americans, and in some cases claiming the former president was referring literally to the way illegal drugs are poisoning Americans.
“First of all, he didn’t say immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country. He said illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country, which is objectively and obviously true to anybody who looks at the statistics about fentanyl overdoses,” Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) said Tuesday.