A new CBS News Poll released on Sunday shows nearly half of U.S. voters surveyed agree with former President Donald Trump‘s controversial comment that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination according to numerous polls, sparked criticism and was accused of echoing Adolf Hitler last month after his remarks about immigrants.
While speaking at an event in New Hampshire on December 16, 2023, the MAGA leader claimed that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States during an event in Durham, New Hampshire.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump said. “They poison mental institutions and 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. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world.”
President Joe Biden‘s campaign was among those to quickly denounce Trump’s comments, saying he had “parroted Hitler.”
Scott Olson/Getty
Newsweek reached out via email on Sunday night to several pollsters and Trump’s representatives for comment.
Despite the backlash over his remarks at the December rally, the CBS News/YouGov found that not only his avid MAGA supporters agree with Trump on immigration.
The CBS survey, which was conducted between January 10 and 12, probed a nationally representative sample of 2,870 American voters, including 786 likely Republicans, according to the national news outlet. The poll surveyed respondents on where they stood on various issues, asking whether they agreed with disagreed with candidates’ comments or stances.
One of the topics in the poll included gauging how people felt about Trump’s use of the phrase “poisoning the blood of the country” when referring to migrants who enter the U.S. illegally.
Of all voters surveyed, not just Republicans, roughly 47 percent said they “agree with Trump” on his comment about illegal immigrants and 53 percent of all voters said they “disagree” with the remark.
While most voters overall disagreed with this language, roughly eight in 10 GOP primary voters said they agreed with it.
Of the Republicans polled, 81 percent said they “agree with Trump” while 19 percent said they “disagree” with the former president’s language.
When Trump made the comment in December, it ignited a firestorm of criticism on social media.
Robert Reich, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Labor Secretary, wrote that “claiming that immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of the country’ is the literal language of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”
Reich said Trump and his allies “are openly embracing fascism.”
Newsweek reached out via Reich’s website on Sunday for comment.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek previously that the former president “gave a great speech and knocked it out of the park” during the December event.
“Contrast that with mainstream media and academia-at-large who have given safe haven for dangerous antisemitic and pro-Hamas rhetoric that is both dangerous and alarming considering what is going on in the world.”
The December speech wasn’t the first time Trump had said that phrase, saying that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in an interview with The National Pulse website in September.
Hitler’s Mein Kampf has several passages in which the genocidal dictator uses words such as “blood” and “poison” to attack Jews and others he viewed as a threat to the Aryan race’s purity.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
