President Biden slammed former President Trump’s recent remarks in which he likened his political opponents to “vermin,” suggesting Tuesday that Trump’s rhetoric echoes language used in Nazi Germany.
“In just the last few days, Trump has said it returns office he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the vermin in America — quote, the vermin in America — a specific phrase because it’s just a specific meaning,” Biden said at a fundraiser in San Francisco.
“It that goes language you heard Nazi Germany in the ’30s. That is [not] even the first time,” he continued. “Trump also recently talked about blood of America has been poisoned. The blood in America has been poisoned. Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”
Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, and Biden and his aides have increasingly targeted the former president directly with criticism about his rhetoric and his policy positions.
Over the weekend, Trump delivered remarks to supporters in New Hampshire in which he pledged that, if reelected, he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” warning of the “threat from within.” He used the same language in a post on Truth Social last Saturday.
The comments were widely condemned by White House aides, lawmakers, historians and a small number of Republicans, with some likening the remarks to language used by dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
Trump in October told The National Pulse, a conservative website, that immigrants coming into the U.S. were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
“It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease,” Trump said at the time. “People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”