Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance was among the Republicans who tried to tie Trump’s comments to the fentanyl crisis. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP
12/21/2023 12:11 PM EST
Amid the ongoing fallout from former President Donald Trump’s comments about immigrants — which have drawn comparisons to Adolf Hitler — some Republicans have leapt to his defense in recent days with an alternate theory: Maybe he was actually talking about the fentanyl crisis.
While some members of his party have balked at or outrightly condemned the remarks , others have come to Trump’s aid.
“My state has more fentanyl poisoning per capita than any state in the country. I had a call with several Alaskan Native leaders three or four months ago — a whole bunch of them online. The first three questions I got in that call — it was a big conference call — was what do you guys do about the southern border,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) told POLITICO Wednesday.
“So if he was kind of getting at that — I didn’t see the whole context of it — I agree. But I wouldn’t use that rhetoric. But are these illegal immigrants poisoning Americans and killing them at really high rates? Yeah, especially in my state, and I’m 4,000 miles away from the border.”
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) similarly tried to tie Trump’s comments to the crisis that left more than 105,000 Americans dead last year.
“First of all, he didn’t say immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country. He said illegal immigrants were poisoning the blood of this country, which is objectively and obviously true to anybody who looks at the statistics about fentanyl overdoses,” Vance said, according to The Hill .
At a New Hampshire rally on Saturday, Trump said millions of people are “let” into the country so “we got a lot of work to do.”
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” Trump said.
“Not just in South America. Not just in the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world they’re coming into our country — from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country. Nobody’s even looking at them. They just come in. The crime is going to be tremendous. The terrorism is going to be,” he added. He doubled down during a rally in Iowa Tuesday.
Democrats have compared his comments to those of Hitler, and on Wednesday, President Joe Biden’s campaign posted images of Trump and Hitler on social media with quotes comparing their language.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment on what he meant about immigrants poisoning the blood of America, but at the Iowa rally he denied any link to Hitler .
On Monday Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) justified the remarks during an interview on CNN and floated her own interpretation of them.
“When he said ‘they are poisoning,’ I think he was talking about the Democratic policies. I think he was talking about the open border policy,” Malliotakis said, pointing to the migrant crisis in New York City.
“You know what’s actually poisoning America is the amount of fentanyl that’s coming over the open border,” she added.
The Republican defenses fit a familiar pattern with the party’s standard bearer that’s played out since his 2016 White House bid: Trump says something controversial that sparks widespread outrage, and his party is left to deflect or find ways to defend.
The cycle seemed to have come to a head in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, as even some of the president’s closest allies in Congress said they had had enough . But since then, most Republicans have rallied around his bid to retake the White House, and Trump continues to lead the GOP primary field by a wide margin in national polls.
Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.
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