CNN’s Abby Phillip in Disbelief When Republican Insists Trump Didn’t Claim Immigrants Are ‘Poisoning the Blood of Our Country’
Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) argued former President Donald Trump was not referring to immigrants when he claimed, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country.”
Speaking at a campaign rally in New Hampshire on Saturday, Trump said:
You know, when they let– I think the real number’s like 15, 16 million people into our country, when they do that, we got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done. They’ve poisoned. Mental institutions and prisons all over the world. 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 gonna be tremendous.
Malliotakis appeared on Monday’s CNN NewsNight, where host Abby Phillip asked her about Trump’s remarks.
“Let me start off by simply asking, is Trump right that immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country?” she inquired.
“Well, don’t I think that’s what he was saying,” Malliotakis responded. “When he said they are poisoning, I think he was talking with the Democratic policies. I think he was talking about open border policy.”
It’s worth pointing out that even if Malliotakis is correct in saying Trump was referring to “Democratic policies,” those policies, as he sees it, are “poisoning the blood of our country” by allowing immigrants into the country. It is a distinction without much of a difference.
“Congresswoman, you’re saying that’s what you think he’s saying,” Phillip said incredulously. “But he was pretty clear. He was saying that the immigrants who are coming in, he says they’re poisoning the blood of the nation.”
“Never said ‘immigrants are poisoning, though,'” she protested.
“He was talking about people coming across the border,” Phillip shot back.
“He didn’t say the word ‘immigrants,'” Malliotakis said while ignoring Trump’s explicit references to people coming to the U.S. from South America, Africa, and Asia. “He was talking about Democratic policies.”
“He was talking about people, not policy,” Phillip replied.
Malliotakis responded by saying some are trying to portray Trump as anti-immigrant.
“The reality is, he was married to immigrants, he’s hired immigrants,” she said, referring to Trump’s wife Melania Trump and his ex-wife Ivana Trump.
Later in the interview, Phillip compared Trump’s comments to a passage in Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, where he wrote, “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Malliotakis rejected the comparison and reiterated her insistence that Trump was talking about policies.
Watch above via CNN.
