Former President Donald Trump's speeches on the campaign trail have taken a noticeably darker tone. And according to a New York Times columnist, his leaning into increasingly violent language is an ominous sign of what a second Trump term could bring.
In her Saturday column, the Times' Maureen Dowd wrote that the 45th president of the United States has lately been a fan of the term "bloodbath," using the term to describe what would happen if he were not elected to a second term. He's also used that term to describe the US' southern border with Mexico. And he's warned audiences that if President Joe Biden wins in November, America itself will be destroyed by "weapons, the likes of which nobody has ever seen before."
"The bloody-minded Trump luxuriates in the language of tyrants," Dowd wrote. "Trump’s raw power grab after his 2020 loss may have failed, but he’s inflaming his base with language straight out of [Shakespearean character] Macbeth’s trip to hell... Like Macbeth, Trump crossed a line and won’t turn back."
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Dowd – who is the daughter of an Irish immigrant — highlighted the former president's increasingly menacing rhetoric toward immigrants. She noted that Trump has frequently used language aimed at stripping immigrants of their humanity.
"Trump embraces Hitleresque phrases to stir racial hatred," she wrote. "He has talked about immigrants 'poisoning the blood of our country.' Last month, he called migrants 'animals,' saying, 'I don’t know if you call them ‘people,’ in some cases. They’re not people, in my opinion.'”
When Trump made those particular comments about immigrants, NBC News reported that they were remarkably similar to what Adolf Hitler wrote in his racist manifesto, Mein Kampf. The eventual German dictator who oversaw the slaughter of six million Jewish people and other ethnic minorities wrote that "all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning."
Dowd opined that the former president may have inherited his views from his father, Fred Trump, who was arrested in 1927 at the age of 21 during a scuffle between supporters of Italy's burgeoning fascist movement and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Fred – himself the son of a German immigrant — likely instilled in his son what Dowd called his "obsession with bloodlines."
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"He thinks there is good blood and bad blood, superior blood and inferior blood," Dowd wrote. "Fred Trump taught his son that their family’s success was genetic, reminiscent of Hitler’s creepy faith in eugenics."
In a 1988 interview with Oprah Winfrey, Trump — who was then seen merely as an eccentric New York real estate developer — alluded to his belief in the "racehorse theory" of human development. Adherents of that theory believe that there are inherently superior men and women, and their offspring will then turn out to be genetically superior to others. Dowd observed that he resurrected that theory during a 2020 rally in Minnesota.
"A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe?" Trump said at the time. "The racehorse theory, you think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota."
Click here to read Dowd's column in its entirety (subscription required)
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