Former United States President, Donald Trump, has come under backlash following his comments on Saturday at a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants are \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Specifically, Trump said immigrants from Africa, Asia, and others from all over the world were flooding the US and feared crimes and terrorism would be on the rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump told the crowd on Saturday that immigrants \u201cfrom all over the world\u201d are \u201cpouring into the country,\u201d reiterating a phrase CNN reported he used previously that sparked an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to the CNN report in October 2023, Trump had said, \u201cNobody has ever seen anything like we\u2019re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country.\u201d He told the right-leaning news site The National Pulse in a video interview. \u201cIt\u2019s poisoning the blood of our country. It\u2019s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reiterating this on Saturday, Trump said, \u201cWe got a lot of work to do. They\u2019re poisoning the blood of our country. That\u2019s what they\u2019ve done.\u201d \u201cThey poison\u2026 mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America \u2026 but all over the world. They\u2019re coming into our country, from Africa, from Asia, all over the world,\u201d he said in the viral video that has equally generated mixed reactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump, who is likely to be the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential race for the White House, while appearing to be taking a swipe at President Joe Biden\u2019s administration, also noted, \u201cThey\u2019re pouring into our country. Nobody\u2019s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous. The terrorism is going to be\u2026 And and we built a tremendous piece of the wall and then we\u2019re going to build more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2018, news reports emerged that Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries \u201cshithole countries\u201d in a meeting with Congressional leaders about immigration policy in the White House. He allegedly went ahead to say he preferred immigrants from Norway and Asia as they helped America economically. Trump denied referring to African nations as shithole countries but said that he used tough words to describe them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NBC NEWS reported Sunday that following Trump\u2019s comments, the Biden campaign released a statement criticising the ex-president\u2019s remarks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDonald Trump channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy. Trump is not shying away from his plan to lock up millions of people into detention camps and continues to lie about that time when Joe Biden obliterated him by over seven million votes three years ago,\u201d the Biden campaign said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of Trump\u2019s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Chris Christie, also called Trump\u2019s remarks \u201cdisgusting\u201d on CNN\u2019s \u201cState of the Union.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe\u2019s disgusting, and what he\u2019s doing is dog-whistle to Americans who feel absolutely under stress and strained from the economy and from the conflicts around the world, and he\u2019s dog-whistling to blame it on people from areas that don\u2019t look like us,\u201d Christie said. \u201cThe other problem with this is the Republicans who are saying this is OK.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He went on to criticise fellow Republican rival Nikki Haley for saying Trump was fit to be president.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou\u2019re telling me that someone who says immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country, someone who says Vladimir Putin is a character witness, is fit to be president of the United States, was the right person at the right time. Nikki Haley should be ashamed of herself. She\u2019s part of the problem because she\u2019s enabling him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Guardian reported that in November, Trump was widely condemned for calling his opponents \u201cvermin\u201d, a language that echoed that used historically by dictators and authoritarians. The report further disclosed that former Republican speaker of the House Paul Ryan called Trump an \u201cauthoritarian narcissist.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NBC disclosed that Trump\u2019s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment about being compared to Hitler but noted Trump had made criticising the handling of America\u2019s southern border a focal point of his campaign and frequently talked about the flow of immigrants into the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s allies in Congress have made immigration a top priority and are demanding new policies be created to handle the border before Republicans will approve additional funding for Ukraine or Israel, both of which are waging wars with backing from the US, the report adds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Knocking Trump\u2019s comments, former minister of foreign affairs, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, said Trump was echoing anti-immigration comments from Germany as well as by Henry Kissinger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to him, both Kissinger and Trump families were immigrants themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prof. Akinyemi in an interview with our correspondent on Sunday said, \u201cThese two came from immigrant families themselves. Well, Trump was born in the US but his parents were immigrants and Kissinger\u2019s parents were immigrants from Germany. He was born in Germany. And when you also look at right-wing politicians, in Britain for example (including some Nigerians), they have become anti-immigrants and yet they are immigrants themselves. I think we have to see this as a syndrome of immigrants turning on their backgrounds in order to make themselves acceptable to their country of adoption. It\u2019s a syndrome. You\u2019re turning on your background and it is very well known psychologically. So I\u2019m not surprised, but I would have expected that people like Kissinger with his intellect would at least get over this or if he couldn\u2019t get over it, he would suppress it rather than give it \u2026 legitimacy.\u201d He noted that this was dangerous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A former Nigerian Ambassador to Mexico, Ogbole Amedu-Ode, said in an interview with The PUNCH on Sunday said such a statement was not new from Trump and it only meant that Nigerians should fix their own country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amedu said, \u201cTrump saying such a thing is not new. It is typically Trump. He has always been like that. You recall when he said people should go back to their \u2018shit hole\u2019 countries. And one of Trump\u2019s doctrines was America first in everything. On a general note, you would discover that Caucasian Americans (white Americans) have been very paranoid about the increasing population of people of other colours \u2013 people of African descent and other races in the US demographic dispensation. So, that discomfort, that feeling of gradually becoming a minority in a country \u2018called their own\u2019 is responsible for such comments from characters like Donald Trump. So for me, it\u2019s not a surprise. It\u2019s just the fact that somebody like that (can be) in power and he\u2019s still considered to be in the running for the Republican ticket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat such comments tell me is that we should get down and fix our country so that migration to other countries will be minimal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The President, International Human Rights and Dignity Defenders Forum, Comr. David Omeike described Trump\u2019s statement as unfortunate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Omeike said, \u201cSuch a statement coming from him is a bit unfortunate. The truth is that he cannot change the standing pattern of life in America. He\u2019s not the first president in that country and not the first to contest and he would not be the last. But it\u2019s good for the sake of posterity that he minds his utterances. He forgets to understand that such statements will only end up demarketing him. Nigerians over there are many so the more he tries to still come up with that racial discrimination, the more he thwarts his chances.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former United States President, Donald Trump, has come under backlash following his comments on Saturday at a rally in New Hampshire that immigrants are \u201cpoisoning the blood of our country.\u201d Specifically, Trump said immigrants from Africa, Asia, and others from all over the world were flooding the US and feared crimes and terrorism would be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":87172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,2],"tags":[9364],"class_list":["post-87171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-travel","category-world","tag-african"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87173,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87171\/revisions\/87173"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.metronews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}