Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) promptly shut down a reporter on Tuesday for accusing Donald Trump of echoing Adolf Hitler.
What is the background?
At a campaign rally in New Hampshire over the weekend, Trump said that illegal immigrants, who have flooded over the southern U.S. border in unprecedented numbers under President Joe Biden’s watch, are negatively impacting American society. The comments were controversial because Trump used the phrase “poisoning the blood,” which the media and Democrats claimed is a nod to Hitler.
When heard in the full context of the speech, Trump was clearly not making a reference to race — as Hitler did in his book “Mein Kampf” — but was referring to the problems that he believes unmitigated immigration has caused in America.
What happened with Vance?
During a press gaggle on Tuesday, an Associated Press reporter asked Vance to react to Trump’s comments. He did and gave her more than she bargained for.
First, Vance corrected the reporter’s framing of the question. Trump did not say all immigrants are “poisoning the blood of America,” Vance pointed out before making a critical observation about the media’s reaction to the remarks.
“He said ‘illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of the country,’ which is objectively and obviously true to anybody who looks at the statistics about fentanyl overdoses,” Vance said. “And just one observation about the press as an organization: You guys seem far more upset about the guy who criticized the problem than you did about Joe Biden, who’s causing the problem.”
The reporter, however, tried to steer the question back to Trump imitating Hitler, but Vance was having none of it.
“You just framed your question implicitly assuming that Donald Trump is talking about Adolf Hitler. It’s absurd! It is absurd,” Vance said. “Why do you think that Donald Trump’s language is targeted at the blood of the immigrants and not at the blood of the American citizens who are being poisoned by the fentanyl problem?”
“You think he was referring to fentanyl?” the reporter pressed.
“I think this is ridiculous,” Vance fired back. “To take [Trump’s] comment and then to immediately assume that he’s talking about immigrants as Adolf Hitler talked about Jews is preposterous!”
“You guys need to wake up and actually do some journalism,” he continued. “Here’s the problem with that question and that framing: You are allegedly a journalist. You’re supposed to speak truth to power, and yet you’re trying to circumscribe and narrow the limits of debate on immigration in this country. What you’re doing is not speaking truth to power. You’re trying to police the guy who’s criticizing the problem so that Americans don’t pay attention to the guy who caused the problem. It’s an absurd question. It’s an absurd framing.”
For the record: Trump denied that he is emulating Hitler, and, to the surprise of no one, he said he has not read “Mein Kampf.”
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