Donald Trump joined conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday to discuss politics and his campaign. The more than 30-minute interview was 30 minutes more time than one should ever spend with the disgraced former president. Around nine minutes in, Hewitt asked Trump about critics who say he has been employing “Hitlerian language” at his rallies.
The specific language Hewitt referred to was Trump’s repeated description of immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump’s response was that he “never knew that Hitler said it,” and he “never read Mein Kampf.” He then rambled about how people of color in America love him and how he’s buddies with lone Black Republican Sen. Tim Scott.
Hewitt, attempting to get Trump back on something resembling the right track, repeated, “Your critics keep saying oh, he wants to be Hitler. He's talking about poisoning our blood. He's trying to be a Nazi. How do you respond to these people?”
First of all, I know nothing about Hitler. I’m not a student of Hitler. 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. What I’m saying when I talk about people coming into our country is they are destroying our country.
Get that? He knows nothing about Hitler, and he never went to school for it. Also, Hitler didn’t say it the way Trump said it (does he mean “as well?”), and Trump’s sentiment is not only that Jews are ruining the country, it’s that everybody trying to immigrate to the United States is “poisoning the blood.” Hewitt never got around to mentioning Trump’s Veterans Day speech where he referred to his opponents as “vermin,” another classic Nazi-era antisemitic bit of business.