'I'm not a student of Hitler,' Trump tells radio host

Former President Donald Trump on Friday repeated and defended a widely criticized comment that immigrants living in the country illegally were "poisoning the blood of our country," dismissing criticism that his language echoed Nazi ideology by saying he was "not a student of Hitler."

In a radio interview, conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt asked Trump to explain his "poisoning the blood" remark and asked him multiple times to respond to those who were outraged that the phrase resembled statements made by Adolf Hitler in his hate-filled manifesto, "Mein Kampf."

Trump said he had no racist intentions behind the statement. Then, he added, "I know nothing about Hitler. I'm not a student of Hitler. I never read his works."

Trump has long had an interest in Hitler, according to news articles, biographers and books about his presidency. A table by his bed once had a copy of Hitler speeches called "My New Order," a gift from a friend that Ivana Trump, his first wife, said she had seen him occasionally leafing through.

Trump once asked his White House chief of staff why he lacked generals like those who reported to Hitler, calling those military leaders "totally loyal" to the Nazi dictator, according to a book on the Trump presidency by Peter Baker, a New York Times reporter, and Susan Glasser. On another occasion, he told the same aide, "Well, Hitler did a lot of good things," according to Michael C. Bender, a journalist who is now a Times reporter, in a 2021 book about Trump.

Trump has denied making both comments. In the radio interview Friday, he continued his defense by pointing out that his phrase -- "poisoning the blood" -- differed from passages in "Mein Kampf" in which Hitler uses "poison" and "blood" to lay out his views on how outsiders were ruining Aryan racial purity.

"They say that he said something about blood," Trump said. "He didn't say it the way I said it, either. By the way, it's a very different kind of a statement."

In "Mein Kampf," Hitler wrote that great civilizations declined "because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood." At one point, Hitler links "the poison which has invaded the national body" to an "influx of foreign blood."

Trump's political career and rise to the presidency is inextricably linked to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and his tone has only grown more severe in his third run for office.

He told Hewitt that he meant "poisoning the blood" to refer to the immigrants coming from Asia, Africa and South America -- although he did not mention Europeans -- who he broadly claimed were coming from prisons and mental institutions. He added that he was "not talking about a specific group" but immigrants from "all over the world" who "don't speak our language."

Trump first directly addressed the comparisons between his comment and Hitler's on Tuesday at a campaign event in Iowa, where he told hundreds of supporters that he had "never read 'Mein Kampf.'"

The next day, the Biden campaign posted a graphic to social media that directly compared Trump to Hitler, using images of them both and listing three quotes from each of them.

Trump has also been accused by historians of echoing the language of fascist dictators, including Hitler. Last month, he described his political opponents as "vermin" that needed to be rooted out.