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Former President Donald Trump at the election campaign appearance in Michigan: agitation with "bloodbath" and "invasion"
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images/AFP
Hate speech against foreigners and those seeking protection is not new for Donald Trump. The ex-president has often warned against migrants, and the construction of a large border wall was one of the favorite topics of his presidency. Instead of the wall, he is now luring people with deportations - and has further intensified his rhetoric and deliberately stirred up fears.
During a campaign appearance in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump accused Democratic President Joe Biden of causing a "bloodbath" with his border policy. Trump claimed that as a result of Biden's lax migration policy, America was faced with an "invasion" of criminals from other countries who came from prisons and "madhouses" and attacked and killed innocent people in the USA. Trump also didn't shy away from the dehumanization of those seeking protection: "They're not people, they're animals."
Under Biden, every US state is a border state and every US city is a border city, said the incumbent's likely challenger in the presidential election at the beginning of November. "Because Joe Biden brought the carnage, the chaos and the killing to us from all over the world and dumped it right in our backyards."
Trump continued: "We will stop the looting, the rape, the slaughter and the destruction of our American suburbs, cities and communities." If re-elected, he would seal the border on his first day in office. "And we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country," said the Republican. At the same time, he warned that the country would "cease to exist" if he was not re-elected president.
Trump's hateful and dehumanizing language
Trump regularly uses radical rhetoric, uses hateful and dehumanizing language, makes racist statements and incites against minorities. He recently caused a stir in another context with the term “bloodbath,” of all things, which he placed at the center of his speech in Michigan and displayed in large letters on his standing desk.
At a campaign event in the state of Ohio in mid-March, the ex-president spoke about how he wanted to make it more difficult to sell Chinese cars on the US market. He added: "If I'm not elected, there will be a bloodbath. ... It will be a bloodbath for the country.” That made a huge impact. Trump's campaign team weighed it down and tried to argue that the 77-year-old had only spoken about the US auto industry and that the "bloodbath" quote had been taken out of context.
In Grand Rapids, Trump addressed the controversy, saying there was an attempt to misattribute the term to him. What Biden is causing is actually a “bloodbath.”
mrc/dpa