Donald Trump is again making the wrong kind of headlines, after speeches and online posts used language that have drawn comparisons to the likes of Hitler and Mussolini by commentators.
At a rally in Ohio last weekend, Trump warned there would be a ‘bloodbath for the country’ if he didn’t win the 2024 presidential election in November and claimed said that migrants were ‘not people’.
Amid rising alarm from the US media, Trump’s campaign staffers insisted his ‘bloodbath’ reference was about the electric vehicle industry.
When he made the comments, Trump had been speaking for at a rally to endorse Senate hopeful Bernie Moreno. Throughout the 90-minute speech, the former President admitted that he was struggling to read the teleprompter and barely mentioned Moreno.
He went on to claim that countries were somehow releasing criminals from their prisons and sending them to the US. Yet Trump’s own border officials have pointed out that the majority of those who attempt to enter the US are actually families fleeing war, and that there is no evidence to support his claims.
Real-world consequences
In 2019, during a speech in El Paso, Texas, a BBC cameraman was attacked by a Trump supporter. Trump, who was President at the time, would point to the media pit at the back of rallies, calling them the ‘fake news media’ to loud boos from the crowd and chants of ‘CNN sucks’.
Also in 2019, Trump gave a speech at a rally in Florida. He spoke of the southern border and asked the crowd, “How do you stop these people?”
When someone in the crowd responded with “Shoot them,” he openly laughed.
A few months later, a mass shooting took place in a Walmart in El Paso, where 23 people were killed and dozens were injured.
The gunman, Patrick Crusius, was 21 years old when he wrote a manifesto speaking of the ‘Hispanic invasion’ of Texas before shooting anyone he believed to be of Hispanic ethnicity.