You’re reading an excerpt from the Today’s WorldView newsletter. Sign up to get the rest free , including news from around the globe and interesting ideas and opinions to know, sent to your inbox every weekday. Former president Donald Trump speaks in Coralville, Iowa, on Dec. 13. (Vincent Alban/Reuters) Over the weekend, former president Donald Trump conjured a new metaphor in his anti-migrant demagoguery. He said undocumented migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States, in language critics immediately associated with the ideological worldview and obsessions with racial purity of earlier 20th-century fascists. Despite a backlash, Trump doubled down later in the week, repeating the line at an Iowa campaign event that those participating in illegal border crossings are “destroying the blood of our country.” This is, on one level, familiar terrain for Trump . In 2015, he launched his first presidential bid by casting Mexican migrants crossing the U.S. southern border as “rapists.” He then moved on to suggesting all potential Muslim refugees were terrorist threats and called for a ban on Islamic immigration. The rhetoric appalled many but played to a galvanized far-right base that helped bring him to power. Advertisement In office, Trump attempted to follow through on his campaign promises with a limited travel ban on a few Muslim-majority nations, a costly and dubiously effective border wall and harsh policies on asylum seekers. Some of those measures were thrown out by President Biden , who has tried to take a more humane approach while enforcing border laws and deporting hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the year. But the Democratic administration faces a desperate political battle in 2024 during which Republicans are expected to leverage anxiety over major recent influxes of undocumented migrants crossing the border. Trump will be leading the […]
Click here to visit source. The West’s ‘poisoning the blood’ moment