Senator Lindsey Graham has criticized Donald Trump's language in describing illegal immigrants, claiming he is more concerned about addressing the border crisis than using politically correct terminology.
It comes as Democrats accuse Trump of invoking Adolf Hitler by calling migrants a “poison” to American society.
Additionally, a new Fox News poll released Sunday shows that 32 percent of Americans believe there is an “emergency at the southern border.”
Graham agrees, saying the focus should be on mitigating that disaster rather than focusing on the words of the former president, who has supported the South Carolina senator in his re-election bid.
“You know, we're talking about language,” Graham told NBC News Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. “I don't care what language people use as long as we get it right.”
“You know, I think the president has a way of talking that sometimes I don't agree with,” Graham added. “But he actually delivered to the border.”
Senator Lindsey Graham said he doesn't care what language Donald Trump uses to describe illegal immigrants, saying the ex-president was successful in addressing the crisis
Comes after Trump was accused of inciting language from German dictator Adolf Hitler when he said migrants were 'poisoning the blood of our country'
'People are looking for results. If all you want to talk about about immigration is the way Donald Trump talks, you're missing a lot.”
Graham said the problem is terrorists and drug dealers crossing the border due to a lack of security.
“I understand why people want to come to America. But we have chaos and we need to create order,” he said.
At a rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Trump said of migrants: “They are poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they did.'
He said illegal immigrants were “poisoning mental institutions and prisons around the world.”
The words appear to be taken from Adolf Hitler's book Mein Kampf, which the Democrats quickly jumped on.
“All the great cultures of the past have perished only because the original creative race has become extinct through blood poisoning,” the German dictator wrote in his 1925 manifesto.
Trump also told his followers, “We've got a lot of work to do – you know, if they let it, I think the real number is 15, 16 million people coming into our country. If they do, we have a lot of work to do.”
It is unclear where he gets this figure from, because US Customs and Border Protection reported that three million migrants crossed the border in 2023 – not 15 or 16 million, as Trump claimed.
Trump said immigrants are “pouring into our country” from Africa, Asia and around the world. He even claimed that 'no one even looks at them, they just come in'.
The former president then ranted incoherently: “Crime will be enormous, terrorism will be enormous, terrorism will… and we built a huge section of the wall and then we're going to build more and the election was rigged.
“We didn't do it, but I thought they were just going to throw it up – it was all built, it was all ready to just be lifted up. The exact wall where the Border Patrol, who are incredible, Brandon Judd and all the people at the Border Patrol, designed exactly that.”
By the time Biden took office in January 2021, about 450 miles of wall had been built and 40 miles of brand new construction — most of it replacing the old fencing.
Trump told his MAGA groupies that migrants from “all over the world” are “poisoning the blood of our country” – a phrase he copied from Hitler, who wrote in Mein Kampf: “All the great cultures of the past are only at perished because the original creative race became extinct due to blood poisoning'
This isn't the first time Trump has been compared to the leader of the Nazis – Hillary Clinton made a direct comparison between Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler as she claimed the former president's victory in 2024 would lead to 'almost unimaginable destruction' for America.
She drew parallels between how the Nazi leader became a dictator and what she said were Trump's “dictatorial, authoritarian tendencies” that would lead to “the end of our country as we know it.”
Trump used the same phrase back in October — prompting former Fox News host Geraldo Rivera to denounce the former president for claiming migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and expressing shock at the “extraordinary, hateful , Hitler-esque quote'. '
Trump received surprised reactions from critics after making the comment in a video interview in October, in which he repeated his previous claims that migrants are criminals, insane, terrorists and the sick.
'No one has any idea where these people come from. We know they come from mental institutions and insane asylums. We know they are terrorists,” Trump said in an interview with The National Pulse, a right-wing website.
“It poisons the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with diseases. People come in with everything you can possibly have,” said Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.