Former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Durham, N.H., Saturday said this about people flooding into our country illegally: “They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done.”
Here’s the full quote:
“When they let — I think the real number of 15, 16 million people into our country — when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned. Mental institutions and prisons all over the world … not just in South America, not just the three or four countries we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, from all over the world they’re pouring into our country. Nobody is even looking at them. They just come in.”
I try to never use comparisons to the Nazis and Adolph Hitler when trying to make a point. Too often it makes for an overly sensational argument that concludes with an exaggerated declaration that “pretty soon we’ll be like Nazi Germany.”
After all, the Holocaust — during which six million Jewish men, women and children were murdered — puts Hitler and Nazi Germany in a class by themselves.
So, let me be clear; I’m not comparing Donald Trump to Adolph Hitler. However, it is still important to look closely at the particular words Trump used — “poisoning our blood.” That is the kind of language demagogues use to appeal to prejudices.
One of Hitler’s anti-semitic rants in “Mein Kampf” invokes the blood purity reference. “All who are not of good race are chaff,” he wrote. Germans must “occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses, and cats, but also with care for the purity of their own blood” (emphasis added).
For decades, racists in this country used the blood purity argument to perpetuate segregation and discrimination. There are thousands of examples, but here are two:
In 1911, Arkansas passed a law known as the “one-drop rule.” It defined as “Negro,” and thus a second-class citizen at the time, anyone “who has … any negro blood.”
The lower court trial judge in the Loving v. Virginia case, where a black woman and a white man were charged with violating the state’s ban on interracial marriage, said, “The fact that he (God) separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
Just last year, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban gave an anti-immigration speech where he criticized Western liberal values and said, “We are willing to mix with one another, but we do not want to become people of mixed-race.”
The issue here is the not-so-subtle subtext that one group is superior to another because of race, which then relegates individuals from the supposedly inferior group to a status less deserving of rights and privileges. On a baser level, it appeals to our worst instincts, justifying bigotry and racism.
Our political leaders are at their best when they appeal to, as Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, “The better angels of our nature.” We, as a people and a country, are capable of unparalleled accomplishment and remarkable generosity when we are guided by those better angels.
But, as flawed human beings, we are also susceptible to our worst instincts, especially when goaded by our leaders.
