Sen. Tommy Tuberville said he is “mad” that former President Donald Trump didn’t make a “tougher” statement about migrants.
At a presidential campaign rally over the weekend Mr. Trump said immigrants who enter the United States illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Some Republican lawmakers have distanced themselves from the comments on one or another grounds. Not Mr. Tuberville.
“I’m mad he wasn’t tougher than that,” the Alabama Republican told reporters Tuesday.
“Have you seen what’s happening at the border? We’re being overrun. They’re taking us over. So a little bit disappointed it wasn’t tougher,” Mr. Tuberville said.
Mr. Trump made the remarks to a crowd of supporters in New Hampshire on Saturday.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” he said of illegal immigrants. “They’ve poisoned mental institutions, prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just in three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. From Africa, from Asia, from all over the world they’re pouring into our country.
Nobody is even looking at them, they’re just coming in. The crime [and terrorism] is going to be tremendous.”
The former president’s comments were criticized by many across the political spectrum, with liberals especially tying the remarks to rhetoric by dictator Adolf Hitler and other Nazis.
Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said Mr. Trump’s comments “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.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell responded to the remark by mentioning his wife, Elain Chao, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan when she was eight years old and served as Mr. Trump’s Transportation secretary.
“It strikes me that it didn’t bother him when he appointed Elaine Chao secretary of Transportation,” Mr. McConnell, Kentucky Republican, told reporters.
This isn’t the first time that Mr. Trump has been slammed for his Nazi-like rhetoric. Last month he called his political opponents “vermin.”
The former president told a crowd in New Hampshire that he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
President Biden himself called out the former president’s “vermin” comment for being similar to Nazi Germany.
“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ‘30s,” Mr. Biden said this week. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about ‘the blood of America is being poisoned.’ Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”
— Ramsey Touchberry contributed to this report.
• Mallory Wilson can be reached at mwilson@washingtontimes.com.