Former US president Donald Trump has defended his comments about migrants crossing the southern border “poisoning the blood” of America.
Mr Trump went on to reinforce the message while denying it bore any similarities to fascist writings others had noted.
He told a campaign rally in Waterloo, Iowa: “I never read Mein Kampf,” in reference to Adolf Hitler’s fascist manifesto.
Mr Trump said that immigrants in the US illegally are “destroying the blood of our country, they’re destroying the fabric of our country”.
In the speech to more than 1,000 supporters from a podium flanked by Christmas trees in red Maga hats, Mr Trump responded to mounting criticism about his anti-immigrant “blood” purity rhetoric over the weekend.
Several politicians and extremism experts have noted his language echoed writings from Hitler about the “purity” of Aryan blood, which underpinned Nazi Germany’s systematic murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables” before and during the Second World War.
As illegal border crossings surge, topping 10,000 some days in December, Mr Trump continued to blast US president Joe Biden for allowing migrants to “pour into our country”.
Mr Trump alleged, without offering evidence, that they bring crime and potentially disease with them.
“They come from Africa, they come from Asia, they come from South America,” he said, lamenting what he said was a “border catastrophe”.
Mr Trump made no mention of the Colorado supreme court’s decision to disqualify him from the state’s ballot under the US Constitution’s insurrection clause, though his campaign blasted out a fundraising email about it during his speech.
The former president has long used inflammatory language about immigrants coming to the US, dating back to his campaign launch in 2015, when he said immigrants from Mexico are “bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists”.
But Mr Trump has espoused increasingly authoritarian messages in his third campaign, vowing to renew and add to his effort to bar citizens from certain Muslim-majority countries, and to expand “ideological screening” for people immigrating to the US.
He said he would be a dictator on “day one” only, in order to close the border and increase drilling.
