President Joe Biden slammed former President Donald Trump for using the word “vermin” to describe his political opponents, comparing it to something the Nazi Germans did.
While speaking at a fundraiser on Tuesday, hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in San Francisco, Biden told the crowd Trump had vowed to “wipe out” his political foes, referred to as, “vermin” and added that the language echoed rhetoric used by the Nazis.
“In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the vermin, quote, the vermin in America – a specific phrase with a specific meaning,” Biden said.
Biden condemned Trump's use of the term "vermin" to describe his political opponents and compared the language to the kind used in Nazi Germany.
— Axios (@axios) November 15, 2023
Biden also called out a another statement Trump recently made about undocumented immigrants. https://t.co/IGm7M6XVKs
“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s,” Biden continued. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, quote, the blood of America is being poisoned. The blood of America is being poisoned. Again, it echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”
Over the weekend during a rally in New Hampshire, Trump promised the crowd that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
Trump’s words also received backlash from many Democratic officials.
Ammar Moussa, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement that Trump had “parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini – two dictators many U.S. veterans gave their lives fighting in order to defeat exactly the kind of un-American ideas Trump now champions.”
A White House spokesman, Andrew Bates, agreed with Moussa, adding the founding fathers would find Trump’s language “unrecognizable,” but veterans who fought against the German Nazis would find it “horrifyingly recognizable.”