I was on Morning Joe Thursday morning as part of a lively panel about Donald Trump’s latest shenanigans. We were talking about his bizarre behavior outside that Manhattan courtroom, New York Attorney General Letitia James’s righteous smackdown of Trump the previous day, and other matters. And then Mehdi Hasan pointed out a remark Trump made to a right-wing outlet this week about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the United States. That’s right—the blood. Here’s the full quote:
Nobody has any idea where these people are coming from, and we know they come from prisons. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they’re terrorists. Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.
It’s mostly the usual stew of lies and toxic grandiosity. But that one sentence is new. Poisoning the blood of our country. That’s straight-up Nazi talk. Don’t believe me? Here’s a sentence from Mein Kampf: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
I ventured that Trump was probably too dumb to know that. Joe Scarborough said, nah, he knows. And I think Scarborough is probably right—or, at the very least, if Trump doesn’t know intellectually that Nazis used such language, he knows intuitively that they probably did, and he’s happy to repeat that language and live in that tradition.
This is what we’re up against. This is the man who nearly half of this country’s voters think ought to be returned to the White House.
We’re 13 months away from D-Day, almost to the day (the election is next November 5). Patriots—not liberals or Democrats; patriots—need to do all we can to alert America to the clear and present danger that is Donald Trump. We do it every day at NewRepublic.com. We do it every month in our print issues. And now we’re doing it live.
The Stop Trump Summit will take place at the Cooper Union in New York City next Wednesday, October 11. It represents our attempt to do in a live venue what we do every day on our website and in our pages: make plain to our fellow Americans the dangers of returning Trump to the White House.
We have a stellar list of panels, speakers, and topics. Representative Jamie Raskin will address Trump’s threat to the Constitution and democracy. Mary Trump, under what’s sure to be the engaging questioning of Molly Jong-Fast, will take us into his twisted brain. The Reverend Al Sharpton will discuss Trump, race, and rights. A panel on Trump and Republicans will feature Stuart Stevens, George Conway, and Stevens’s Lincoln Project partner Tara Setmayer. A panel on whether the Republicans can steal the election will include Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Elisabeth Frost, the chief of litigation at Marc Elias’s law firm. A historians panel will feature Nell Irvin Painter, David Greenberg, and Strongmen author Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Miles Taylor, the former Trump-era Department of Homeland Security operative who has become one of Trump’s most articulate and compelling critics, will speak. Even Robert De Niro is slated to appear.
It’s going to be a terrific day. We’re going to have some fun—the old Trump Baby Balloon from 2016 will be flying outside the hall, in the spirit of mockery. But mostly, it’s serious business, because life doesn’t get much more serious than this. If you’re in New York, get a ticket and come watch in person. If you aren’t, you can stream it. Come join the cause.
