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https://www.axios.com/2023/12/20/trump-gop-poisoning-blood-country-hitler-rhetoric
Republican reactions to former President Trump's claim that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" are shedding light on the GOP's defensive playbook for 2024, honed over years of cyclical outrage.
Why it matters: With Trump's team convinced he could lock up the GOP nomination by early March, Republicans could spend one of the longest general election campaigns in modern history being forced to answer for his extreme rhetoric at every turn.
>President Biden's campaign, which has compared Trump's dehumanizing comments to Adolf Hitler's rhetoric at least four times in the past six weeks, is committed to turning the screws on Trump's supporters.
>"Every time he says it, we are going to call it out," Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler told Politico. "He's going to echo the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, and we're going to make sure that people understand just how serious that is every single time."
Zoom in: Republican responses to Trump's incendiary rhetoric generally fall into a range of three buckets, usually dictated by level of loyalty to the MAGA brand:
1. Feigned ignorance: By far the most common response during the Trump presidency, lawmakers routinely dodged reporters in the halls of Congress by claiming they "hadn't seen" the latest Oval Office diatribe.
>Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Trump's chief rivals for the nomination, told Fox News: "I don't know what this means with the blood stuff. I know people are trying to draw historical allusions. I don't know if that's what he meant."
>House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a Trump ally whose viral takedown of university presidents over anti-semitism has boosted her national profile, has been silent on the controversy.
Republican reactions to former President Trump's claim that undocumented immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" are shedding light on the GOP's defensive playbook for 2024, honed over years of cyclical outrage.
Why it matters: With Trump's team convinced he could lock up the GOP nomination by early March, Republicans could spend one of the longest general election campaigns in modern history being forced to answer for his extreme rhetoric at every turn.
>President Biden's campaign, which has compared Trump's dehumanizing comments to Adolf Hitler's rhetoric at least four times in the past six weeks, is committed to turning the screws on Trump's supporters.
>"Every time he says it, we are going to call it out," Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler told Politico. "He's going to echo the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, and we're going to make sure that people understand just how serious that is every single time."
Zoom in: Republican responses to Trump's incendiary rhetoric generally fall into a range of three buckets, usually dictated by level of loyalty to the MAGA brand:
1. Feigned ignorance: By far the most common response during the Trump presidency, lawmakers routinely dodged reporters in the halls of Congress by claiming they "hadn't seen" the latest Oval Office diatribe.
>Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, one of Trump's chief rivals for the nomination, told Fox News: "I don't know what this means with the blood stuff. I know people are trying to draw historical allusions. I don't know if that's what he meant."
>House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), a Trump ally whose viral takedown of university presidents over anti-semitism has boosted her national profile, has been silent on the controversy.
