Trump Unable To Come Up With Own Material, Keeps Ripping Off Hitler

What's next? Invading Poland?

This weekend, Donald Trump went to one of his most comfortable rhetorical spots — the one where he starts sounding a whole lot like Hitler. Well, not just Hitler. Pretty much anyone widely famous for hating people unlike themselves from Hitler to Trump’s own tiki-torch wielding acolytes to Voldemort, because none of them are ever all that original.

“They let — I think the real number is 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,” Trump told a crowd of his rapt, dead-eyed followers at a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday. “That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”

This is not even original for Trump. He’s tried this line out before, during an interview with The National Pulse, a relatively obscure right-wing media outlet. He clearly thinks it’s a good one, despite the fact that, apart from being incredibly offensive and racist, it doesn’t actually make any sense.

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He’s also very fond of this “mental institutions” line, which he has been repeating all over the place since at least April of this year. His claim is that there is a doctor at a South American mental institution (not even a specific country, just somewhere on the general continent) who says he has nothing to do anymore because all of the mentally ill people have been shipped off to the United States. We will never know what all-caps email forward he got this one from, as even his own campaign cannot find any evidence that it came from anywhere other than his own fevered imagination.

Hitler, as we all know, was also fond of saying that people — in his case, Jewish people — were going to poison the blood of Germany. He wrote about it in Mein Kampf, which we would have thought was above Trump’s reading level. What he meant by that was that Jewish people and non-Jewish people might have babies, which would then mean that there would be fewer pureblood Aryans in the country, somehow. It’s also very clearly what Donald Trump means. His fans are frequently weird losers who think they have a real shot at turning this enormous country, already filled with people of all different ethnicities and cultures and beliefs (not to mention 37 different spin-offs of “90 Day Fiancé”) into the homogenous white Christian nationalist ethnostate of their dreams.

This is an objectively sickening and insane thing to say about anyone or any group of people. Well, unless you want to be literal about things. A case could certainly be made for the Republicans who have outlawed abortion in their states (and Trump, to whom we owe this state of affairs), forcing doctors to wait until a patient is in or on the verge of sepsis (also known as blood poisoning) before granting them one.

But I digress. The truly scary thing about this kind of rhetoric is that, despite how untrue it is, how revolting it is, despite how little sense it makes to anyone with two brain cells to rub together, it is also very effective.

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It is a normal human instinct to feel compassion for refugees fleeing oppression and violence, and most especially for children in such situations, as well as for people coming to this country for a better life as all of our own ancestors did.

Trump telling people “you don’t have to feel badly for these people, because this specific group of people, for reasons, are bad and a threat to you, and their children will grow up to be bad and a threat to you” allows them to fight against that human instinct – often to what they believe is their own benefit. The more someone steels themselves against such human impulses, the colder they become, the less they care about other human beings in general.

It’s the same reason why the Right demonizes the poor who live here and why they are so worried about white children feeling “guilty” about racism. It’s not because they’re worried it will give them some kind of self-esteemectomy, but because compassion, empathy and reality-based information are obstacles to getting what they want.

I would love to believe that such an explicit call to white nationalism would leave a bad taste in the mouths of most Americans, but unfortunately the primary criticism coming from the Fox crowd is that they are sad that the media will focus on the unbelievably disturbing thing he said instead of real issues like people making porn in the Senate hearing chamber.