Donald Trump has never read Mein Kampf, the book Adolph Hitler dictated while in prison serving a short jail sentence after attempting a coup d’etat, known as the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.
First published in 1925, Hitler wrote in My Struggle, "All great cultures of the past perished only because the original creative race died out from blood poisoning."
Trump has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” One of his minions defended him by saying that was normal, everyday speech, and not xenophobic or racists. That’s what many Germans said about Hitler and his comments.
Trump reportedly has been fascinated by Hitler for a long time, even reportedly receiving a copy of Hitler’s speeches as a gift and making a comment about Hitler having done a lot of good while on a visit to France as president.
In other words, Trump did not have to read Mein Kampf to be familiar with Hitler’s repeated comments about the need to keep German blood pure. Or to understand what he meant by those words.
Trump’s fascination with Hitler is interesting because he was born on June 14, 1946, in New York City. World War II and the emerging evidence of the Holocaust were fresh events, not history. Hitler was hardly popular in this country and New York had a large Jewish population. Of course, anti-Semitism was widespread in the United States at the time, but so was racism. And both are still around.
I am not sure what blood Trump is worried about. We are a nation of immigrants. Even the ancestors of Native Americans immigrated from Asia. They just got here before anyone else, so they have a claim to the title.
Our strength as a nation has always been found in our immigrants and their descendants, people seeking a better life for themselves and their children. That is as true today as it has been throughout our history.
You will find few Americans with “pure blood.” The vast, overwhelming majority of us have ancestors from different countries and even different continents.
It would be good for Trump and those of a similar ilk to remember that there is only one race: the human race.
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