Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI) said that former President Donald Trump is normalizing “bigotry” over his stance against illegal immigration.
The Michigan lawmaker argued that the United States is a nation of immigrants and that the former president is encouraging people to hold their “bigoted views” against immigrants. Trump is the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party ahead of the 2024 election, setting the stage for a rematch between him and President Joe Biden.
“What Donald Trump is trying to do in the name of his own political expediency is to normalize bigotry again,” Kildee said in a Sunday interview. “To make it OK to hold those bigoted views and to try to motivate people to act the worst instincts that they will carry inside them, and unfortunately, what he’s doing is deciding that that’s going to be the focus of his campaign.”
Kildee also said Trump is using security on the southern border as a political tool ahead of the 2024 election and that he is encouraging Congress not to support legislation that would secure the border. House Republicans are in a tug-of-war over securing the border and providing financial aid for Ukraine, with some Republicans warning House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) not to support Ukraine without securing the border.
Trump has faced criticism from Democrats over how he has spoken out against illegal immigrants in the U.S., as he generated controversy for using the phrase “poisoning the blood” during a December rally in Durham, New Hampshire, on immigrants. The former president has defended his choice of wording, arguing that “we have people coming in from prisons and jails.”
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“It also gets people thinking about very important issues that if you don’t use certain rhetoric, if you don’t use certain words, and maybe are not very nice words, nothing will happen,” Trump said in an interview last month. “That did stir debate, but it happens to be true.”
Likely voters for the 2024 presidential election have identified illegal immigration, inflation, and the economy as the issues that matter most to them, according to the Center Square Voters’ Voice Poll.