Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke compared President Trump’s rhetoric to that of Nazi Germany Thursday, citing in particular Trump’s controversial comments about illegal immigrants.
At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa, the former representative from the border town of El Paso, Texas was harshly critical of “the rhetoric of a president who not only describes immigrants as rapists and criminals, but as animals and an infestation.”
“Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as an infestation in the Third Reich,” O’Rourke remarked to a crowd of students at Morningside College. “I would not expect it in the United States of America.”
Later Thursday, O’Rourke doubled down on his comments, telling reporters, “I compared the rhetoric that the president has employed to rhetoric that you might have heard during the Third Reich.”
Trump has called some illegal immigrants including members of the brutal El Salvadoran gang MS-13 “animals” and accused Democrats of wanting “illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13.”
“Describing immigrants, who have a track record of committing violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans, as rapists and criminals. Seeking to ban all Muslims, all people of one religion,” O’Rourke said. “What other country on the face of the planet does that kind of thing? Or in our human history or in the history of the Western world?”
“Putting kids in cages? Saying that neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists are ‘very fine people’? You draw your own conclusions, but this is not something that I expected to hear a president of the United States of America ever say,” he added.