As a descendant of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who thankfully left their home countries of Slovakia, Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus a few decades before Hitler came to power, it brings me great anxiety and sadness to be making a comparison between the next president of the United States and a man who most certainly would have slaughtered my ancestors if given the chance.
Trump’s rhetoric echoes the racism and dehumanization present in the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler. His language is uncharacteristic of a politician governing on behalf of all Americans irrespective of race, ethnicity, or citizenship status. It is the kind of talk expected from a totalitarian dictator.
In 2023, Trump argued at least four times that immigrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf, claimed that “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” While this is the most striking parallel between the rhetoric used by Trump and Hitler, it is far from the only similarity.
From the start of his first campaign, Trump has consistently used xenophobic rhetoric to target immigrants and minority identity groups. In his 2015 announcement speech, he described Mexican immigrants as “rapists” bringing “drugs” and “crime,” to the U.S. In 2020, as the president of the United States, Trump repeatedly referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as the “China virus.” As scholar Jennifer Zheng explains, “the number of Chinese and other Asian hate crimes grew exponentially” after Trump’s use of the term.
Throughout his 2024 campaign, Trump targeted immigrants with an even greater intensity. He referred to undocumented immigrants as “animals” and insisted that “they’re not humans.” He falsely accused Haitian immigrants of “destroying” Springfield, Ohio residents’ “way of life,” and “eating the pets of the people that live there.” As Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison posted on X, Trump’s false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating pets was “a racist lie designed to dehumanize Haitian immigrants as savages.” Trump even charged his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, with bringing “illegal gang members and migrant criminals […] into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens.”
Trump has deliberately adopted the tactics used by Hitler throughout his rise to power. Hitler portrayed Jews as a subhuman race aiming to “poison” the “pure” blood of the Aryan race. To support his pseudoscience, he claimed that Jews were “raping” Aryan females and “importing” Black people into Germany. Like Trump, Hitler built his following by validating the fears of his supporters, and casting blame for poor societal conditions on a perceived “out-group.” Both Trump and Hitler appeal to fears of rising racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity to portray vulnerable groups as unworthy of belonging to the body politic and warranting elimination.
Indeed, in his 1939 Reichstag speech, Hitler advocated for the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” Trump, although he has not called for the state-sponsored genocide of immigrants and members of minority identity groups, has conveyed that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, are unworthy of belonging to the American body politic. During the 2024 campaign, Trump told the American public that “The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
Although Trump may be known for his hard-line views toward undocumented immigrants, his racist portrayal of the Springfield’s Haitian migrants as “pet eaters” shows that he perceives legal immigrants as similarly illegitimate. As the official website for the City of Springfield explains, the Haitian immigrants Trump viciously ridiculed throughout the 2024 campaign are in the United States legally under the Immigration Parole Program, and are eligible to apply for Temporary Protected Status. What this shows is that Trump’s antagonistic views toward immigrants have nothing to do with status. Like Hitler, Trump understands citizenship as solely a matter of racial birthright.
Another parallel between Trump and Hitler’s rhetoric is the portrayal of immigrants as threatening a homogenous nation’s traditional way of life. Hitler, in arguing against Jews holding “leading positions in the State,” claimed that “Above all…German culture… is German and not Jewish.” This is a portrayal of Jews as existing outside of German culture, and actively threatening it by their existence. Similarly, Trump has repeatedly questioned the legitimacy of non-white leaders, casting them as un-American.
In 2011, Trump told NBC’s Today that he had “real doubts” that President Barack Obama, the first African American to serve as president, was born in the United States. Even after the release of President Obama’s birth certificate, which confirmed that he was born in Hawaii, Trump continued to dispute Obama’s citizenship. In 2012, Trump posted on Twitter that an “extremely credible source” told him that Obama’s birth certificate was “a fraud.”
During his 2024 campaign, Trump said at a Latino outreach campaign event in Miami that Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to both serve as vice president and lead a major party ticket, was “the worst,” “slow,” and possessed a “low IQ.” Trump also falsely suggested that Harris misled voters about her race. During his appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, Trump falsely claimed that Harris, who is of both Jamaican and Indian descent, had only identified with her South Asian heritage prior to entering national politics. Trump said “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”
Perhaps the most disturbing parallel between the rhetoric of Trump and Hitler is the use of dehumanization, specifically likening the “out-groups” they target to non-human organisms. For example, Hitler claimed that “The Jew has never been a nomad, but always a parasite, battening on the substance of others.” A parasite, such as a flea, is an organism that thrives at the expense of its host. Hitler, in describing Jews as “parasites,” portrayed them as not only threatening, but also as non-human organisms.
Trump, in referring to undocumented immigrants as “animals” and insisting that “they’re not humans,” and in accusing Haitian immigrants of eating pets, has portrayed immigrants and members of minority identity groups as non-human. Not only did he explicitly state in a speech in Michigan that undocumented immigrants suspected of crimes are “not humans,” but he has furthermore utilized racist stereotypes of people of color as being “pet eaters” in order to portray Haitian immigrants as wild animals.
Trump has also utilized dehumanizing rhetoric to attack his domestic opponents and critics, calling them “vermin” during a Veterans Day speech in 2023. His use of that term is particularly historically-loaded: as historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat said in an email to The Washington Post, dictators Hitler and Benito Mussolini used the word “vermin” to “dehumanize people and encourage their followers to engage in violence.”
The dehumanization parallel between Trump and Hitler should be seen as the most disturbing, as such dehumanization can be not only used to justify actions but also to breed more dehumanization. Hitler and the Nazis used dehumanization to justify the murder of Jews in concentration camps, but they did not stop there. The camps themselves functioned as mechanisms of dehumanization, as Jews were tattooed with serial numbers so they could be identified in place of their names, were forced to surrender their clothes and belongings, and were made to endure being stripped naked and shaved.
Trump, when asked whether he would build detention camps as part of the mass deportation of immigrants, has said “I would not rule out anything.” My question is whether “anything” includes the translation of his dehumanizing rhetoric into acts that violate basic human rights.
While it may seem unrealistic that Trump would allow immigrants to be subjected to the acts of dehumanization inflicted by the Nazis on the Jewish people, his statement is carefully designed to leave the door open for any future acts he deems necessary. Furthermore, Trump has already shown his capacity to subject immigrants to dehumanization, as indicated by the disturbing images of detained migrant children in cages during his first term.
The parallels between the rhetoric used by Trump and Hitler reveal that Trump is unfit to serve as the president of a nation founded upon the celebration of racial, ethnic, and cultural heterogeneity. It is unacceptable for a leader of a liberal democracy to utilize such rhetoric, regardless of whether that leader truly intends to translate words into action.
Trump, based on his rhetoric, should be understood as American democracy’s next potential destroyer and not as its next defender. His rhetoric should not be dismissed as words that cannot be translated into action, but must be regarded as the same mechanisms that justified the racism and dehumanization of Hitler’s Germany. We as a global community must become aware of the similarities between the next American president and one of history’s most oppressive dictators to prevent ourselves from falling complicit in the evisceration of liberal democracy.
