‘Shocking!’ CNN’s Jake Tapper Stunned By Poll Showing Trump Nazi-Echoing HELPS With Republican Voters
CNN anchor Jake Tapper was stunned by a poll published this month showing former President Donald Trump’s Nazi-echoing speeches about “poisoning the blood” and eliminating “vermin” from the U.S. overwhelmingly help him with Republicans in Iowa.
Trump is under fire once again — including from Tapper — after he delivered another Hitler-echoing rant at a rally in Durham, New Hampshire, on Saturday in which he accused several groups of non-White immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country.”
But newly-released results from an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll — taken December 2-7, before the most recent speech — show those Hitler-esque speeches help him with Iowa GOP voters by nearly two-to-one.
On Wednesday’s edition of CNN’s The Lead, Tapper said he was shocked by the results and asked his panel to explain why so many Republicans “say, ‘more please, I like this Hitler language'”:
TAPPER: I want to get both of your reactions to this because this was shocking, a Des Moines Register poll of Iowa voters asked likely Republican caucus goers what they thought about a candidate who used the term immigrants poisoning the blood of America, 42 percent of Iowa Republicans said it would make them more likely to support that candidate, 28 percent less likely, 29 percent does not matter. So, a plurality of Republican caucus goers, David and then Doug, say, more please, I like this Hitler language.
FRUM: Look, I’m just going to go back to the thing I keep insisting to Republicans. You have a chance to run the race you want to run. Who knows what will work? Who knows what — how the voters will evolve? Who knows what will happen with interest rates and crises in abroad?
What you can know, the only thing you can control is the kind of candidate you are. And if you lose, how you will look back on your loss. And there are candidates who can look back and say, as Ted Kennedy said in 1980, I fought the good fight. Do you want to be the candidate who looks back and says I fought a disgusting fight?
TAPPER: What do you what do you make of this 42 percent support of Republican caucus goers for language that seems cribbed from — yes.
HEYE: Republican or Democrat, anybody who spent time in Iowa around the caucus knows the term Iowa nice. Iowa voters are the nicest people in the world. But what we’ve seen in the Trump era is that part of the Republican base is not so nice. And another part of the base, so you combine these two, anything that Donald Trump says they’ll just say, yes, give me more of that, whether they think about it or not. And what troubles me isn’t just the language that Trump uses, but if he’s using it and then wins, what is he going to do within that rhetoric?
What are the actions that follow the rhetoric? And that’s what gets us to a very, very un-American place.
Watch above via CNN’s The Lead.
