Donald Trump has always given off strong authoritarian vibes, but recently he’s up the ante. How? By straight-up paraphrasing Adolf Hitler. The former president added a new routine in which he rails against immigrants who he said are “poisoning the blood of our country.” As it happens that’s the exact phrasing Hitler used to use to describe Jewish people. Is Trump quoting him intentionally? He’s said no, offering an unusual defense: He doesn’t know jack about history.
Per The Daily Beast, Trump did a softball interview with Hugh Hewitt, who, like Sean Hannity, tried to get him to say, once and for all, that he’s going full dictator. It went…sort of well.
“I’m not a student of Hitler,” Trump told Hewitt. “I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood, he didn’t say it the way I said it either, by the way, it’s a very different kind of a statement.”
Then Trump went right back to paraphrasing Hitler.
“They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums,” Trump again said of immigrants. “They’re terrorists, absolutely, that’s poisoning our country, that’s poisoning the blood of our country.”
When Hewitt again stressed that Hitler once used that exactly language to describe Jews, Trump tried a different defense, claiming he didn’t mean anything racist when he described large groups of people as “poisoning the blood” of the nation, adding that he’s “doing incredibly” in polls with Black and Hispanic voters.
Last week an old Vanity Fair piece from 1990, in which this then-wife Ivana Trump revealed that Trump kept a book of Hitler speeches in a “cabinet by his bed,” which he sometimes read. It was not Mein Kampf; rather, it was a collection called My New Order. Trump even admitted he had a Hitler book, which he said was given to him by a Jewish person (who later revealed he wasn’t Jewish).
It’s long been ambiguous whether Trump can actually read, or if he simply doesn’t have the attention span to read anything more than a teleprompter, which he rarely uses. But before his brain turned to mush, perhaps he did read some Hitler speeches. Maybe he simply read the Führer’s “poisoning the blood” words, thought that was a cool turn of phrase, forgot where he read it, then a few decades later was out there quoting Adolf Hitler. If so, whoops!
(Via The Daily Beast)
Source: https://uproxx.com/viral/trump-invoking-hitler-doesnt-know-history/