Donald Trump has the tacit blessing of senior Republican figures as he seeks to put border security front and center of the 2024 election by deploying fascistic language to fire up his support base, political analysts warn.

The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 has called for a sharp crackdown on immigration and asserted at a weekend rally that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.

The comment drew on words similar to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his autobiography and manifesto Mein Kampf.

But, despite widespread condemnation of Trump’s remarks, some top Republicans have shied away from criticizing the former US president, who is the overwhelming favorite to win the party’s nod to face off against Joe Biden in the race for the White House.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right … I think the president has a way of talking sometimes I disagree with. But he actually delivered on the border.” Nicole Malliotakis, a New York congresswoman, told CNN: “He never said ‘immigrants are poisoning’, though … He didn’t say the word ‘immigrants’.”

And this week Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, signed a law that allows police to arrest migrants suspected of crossing the border illegally and permits judges to order them to leave the US. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said: “It is very much in line with what many Republicans like to do or tend to do, which is demonise immigrants and also dehumanise immigrants.”

Activists note how the Republican party has veered right with Trump. Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino, a grassroots political organisation, said via email: “Trump may say the quiet parts loud, but he’s far from alone. There were members of the Republican party not long ago who understood the need for bringing the country together. [President George W] Bush, a Texan, sought immigration reform.

“Today, we see elected Republicans use rhetoric and policies for political expediency at the cost of unification. There is no doubt that we are living in a multicultural democracy – the first in history. Instead of embracing this superpower that will serve us well on the world stage, they choose division that hurts millions of fellow citizens.”

Immigration is one of the most divisive problems in American politics, and bipartisan reform attempts have repeatedly failed over the past two decades. On Tuesday leaders of the Senate said a deal to bolster border security and provide additional aid to Ukraine is unlikely to come together soon.

The White House’s willingness to consider concessions, and even a revival of Trump-like policies, has drawn fierce condemnation from progressives in Congress and activists who say the ideas would gut the asylum system and spark fears of deportations from immigrants already living in the US.

Kumar warned against policymaking based on fearmongering. “Right now, extremists have taken the issue hostage, and they are making a commonsense solution impossible. The current immigration debate is way out of step with where Americans are on the issue, and I expect this will drive Latinos and moderates to the polls in 2024.”

While Trump’s language echoes Nazis in its extremism, it arrives in the context of years of Republicans shifting the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. Tom Tancredo, a former congressman from Colorado, pushed for strict immigration laws and enforcement and was accused of ties to white nationalist groups.

Steve King, a former congressman from Iowa, once compared immigrants to dogs and defended the terms “white nationalism” and “white supremacy”. (King has recently campaigned with the rightwing Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in Iowa.) Nativist dog whistles have now been replaced by a totalitarian bullhorn.

Joe Walsh, elected to Congress in the populist Tea Party wave of 2010, said of Trump’s recent comments: “As someone who used to say shit like that too much, I know that this issue animates the Republican party base better than any other issue, so Trump will keep saying shit like this because it works.”

More than seven in 10 Republicans (72%) say newcomers are a threat, compared with a far lower percentage of independents (43%) and Democrats (21%), according to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington. Two in three Republicans agree with the “great replacement” theory, which posits an elite conspiracy to supplant and disempower white people.

Walsh, now a podcast host and outspoken Trump critic, added: “The Republican party base is older and white. You can scare the shit out of them by talking about all these brown and Black people coming from all these different countries into America and it’s going to change America. That scares the white party base more than anything.”

But while Democrats abhor Trump’s choice of words, some may be vulnerable to the underlying message. As record numbers cross the US-Mexico border, seven in 10 voters disapprove of the president’s performance on immigration, according to a Monmouth University opinion poll released this week. It is no longer an issue for border states alone as thousands of migrants are bussed to major cities.

Walsh commented: “Democrats better watch out because this issue – not Trump’s language – is a huge vulnerability for Joe Biden and the Democrats. There are a lot of people outside of the Maga [Make America Great Again] base who care about our border but are too afraid to say anything. This issue has resonance.”

Democrats are on the defensive. At a press conference, Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, conceded: “What Donald Trump said and did was despicable, but we do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”

For many it is cause for alarm ahead of next year’s presidential election, expected to be a rematch between Biden and Trump. John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “What had been evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans on the border and on undocumented workers has shifted now towards Trump.

“He is defining the issue. The stance on border security is much more defined and much more the dominant position than the issue behind fairness, equity, even the role of federal government. Those who care about undocumented workers are just not in the mainstream any more.”

Biden campaign releases graphic comparing Trump to Hitler

The campaign of U.S. President Joe Biden has released a graphic showing the parallels between former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, Politico reported on Dec. 20.

The graphic, posted on X, marks a more aggressive turn in Biden’s campaign attempt to link his potential Republican opponent in the general elections with the Nazi leader.

Titled “Trump Parrots Hitler,” the graphic juxtaposes three quotes from the 45th president with quotes from the dictator.

One of Trump’s quotes, “Immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” appears above a Hitler quote that states that the “contamination of the blood” by an “inferior race” will lead to the fall of Germany.

“This is not a coincidence,” Biden’s campaign said on X.

Historically, comparing a political opponent to Hitler was almost forbidden in political campaigns. However, for the Biden campaign, this has become a routine matter, with historians noting that Trump’s rhetoric echoes that of fascist leaders.

Over the past few weeks, Biden’s campaign has consistently linked Trump’s statements to Hitler and urged reporters to scrutinize the speeches of the former president, especially on immigration issues.

Trump dismissed these comparisons but did not retract his comments.

During a weekend rally, Donald Trump told supporters that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”

Later, the League of United Latin American Citizens and the Anti-Defamation League accused Trump of indulging in “the lowest and most sinister human emotions” and compared him to Hitler.

Biden compares Trump to Hitler as he runs against tide of authoritarianism in a new age of strongmen.

The Biden campaign has taken to comparing former President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler, and the president himself has also stepped into the fray.

In the last month and a half, as Mr Trump’s rhetoric has grown more extreme, calling his political opponents “vermin” and claiming that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the Biden campaign has issued statements comparing Mr Trump to the Nazi leader at least four times. 

It’s a continuation of Mr Biden’s 2020 campaign, when he was running to “restore the soul of America” and the US as the global leader of the liberal international world order amid a steady rise of authoritarianism throughout the 2010s.

A new age of strongmen

Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary, the recently ousted Law and Justice Party in Poland, ex-President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, and most importantly Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, are all examples of leaders who have based their leadership on the idea that we are in a new age of strongmen.

Many of them Mr Biden will have known personally from his time as vice president and senator atop the Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr Biden has made clear that the cataclysm that led to his decision to run in 2020 was the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 after which Mr Trump said there were “very fine” people on both sides – both among the counter-protesters and among the violent white supremacists carrying tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us”.

Biden’s focus on the fate of global democracy

Mr Biden’s focus on the fate of global democracy was clear after he entered the White House as he hosted a “Summit for Democracy” within a year of becoming president "to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad".

But the threats Mr Biden saw in 2020 haven’t gone away. If anything, they have worsened. Mr Putin is more confident than ever that he can outlast the Western world after the less-than-stellar start of his invasion of Ukraine, and Mr Xi recently became the first Chinese leader to begin a third term atop the Chinese Communist Party since the death of Mao.

At home, Mr Trump is going further than ever, bringing his admiration for dictators and strongmen into public view, using the criticism of left-of-centre leaders to whip up his base and attempting to paint himself as borderline messianic, saying again and again that he’s being targeted because he’s standing up for the ordinary American.

Mr Biden has even said that he’s unsure he would run again if he wasn’t facing Mr Trump, whose GOP nomination is seen by most observers as a foregone conclusion.

After the Colorado Supreme Court booted Mr Trump from the state’s ballot this week for his part in the Capitol riot, Mr Biden was asked on Wednesday if Mr Trump is an insurrectionist.

"It’s self-evident. You saw it all. Now whether the 14th Amendment applies, I’ll let the court make that decision. But he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero,” Mr Biden said.

‘Don’t compare me to the Almighty’

The White House and Mr Biden appear to be using the image of Hitler, the most reviled figure in modern history, to go on the offensive against the former president in an effort to remind voters and the coalition that brought him to power in 2020 of why they ousted Mr Trump in the first place.

The president likes to quote his dad when criticising his predecessor: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

Mr Biden is telling voters that even if they don’t like him, take a good look at who he’s up against. The Biden campaign appears to want voters to believe that they must re-elect the president, or witness the rise of fascism in America.

‘Echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany’

At a fundraiser in San Franciso in November, Mr Biden slammed Mr Trump’s comments in New Hampshire, where he said he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.

“There’s a lot of reasons to be against Donald Trump, but damn he shouldn’t be president,” Mr Biden said.

“In just the last few days, Trump has said, if he returns office, he’s gonna go after all those who oppose him and wipe out what he called the ‘vermin’, quote, ‘the vermin in America’ – a specific phrase with a specific meaning,” Mr Biden said.

“It echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the ’30s,” Mr Biden said. “And it isn’t even the first time. Trump also recently talked about, quote, ‘the blood of America is being poisoned’ – ‘the blood of America is being poisoned.’ Again, echoes the same phrases used in Nazi Germany.”

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement at the time that “on a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump parroted the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans gave their lives fighting”.

Compared Trump and GOP senators to Nazi propagandist

Mr Biden compared Mr Trump to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in September 2020. Shortly before he would go on to beat him in the election that November, Mr Biden told MSNBC that Mr Trump was "sort of like Goebbels”.

"You say the lie long enough, keep repeating it, repeating it, repeating it, it becomes common knowledge," Mr Biden said, reacting to Mr Trump trying to make his opponent out to be a socialist.

“I think people see very clearly the difference between me and Donald Trump,” Mr Biden said. “Trump is clearing protests in front of the White House that are peaceful with the military. This guy is more Castro than Churchill.”

Mr Biden also compared Texas Senator Ted Cruz to Goebbels after the 2020 election after the senator pushed Mr Trump’s lies about the election being stolen.

The then-president-elect remembered Goebbels’ exaggeration of civilian deaths during the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War, which ran in newspapers across the globe. Goebbels argued that the bigger the lie and the more it was repeated, the likelier it was that it would come to be believed.

Mr Biden noted that both Mr Cruz and Mr Trump pushed the notion that there was something wrong with the election in the face of a complete lack of evidence to back up their claims.

“They’re part of the big lie,” Mr Biden said at the time. “When we were told that, you know, Goebbels and the great lie … when Dresden was bombed, firebombed, there were 250 people that were killed. [Or] was it 2,500 people that were killed? And Goebbels said no, 25,000, or 250,000 were killed. And our papers printed that. Our papers printed it. It’s a big lie.”

Around 25,000 civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden in early 1945, months before the surrender of Nazi Germany. Goebbels, known for his lies, claimed that 200,000 died.

Mr Biden was asked if Mr Cruz or Missouri Sen Josh Hawley, who also took part in the delaying of the certification of the results, should resign, Mr Biden said: “They should be just flat beaten the next time they run.”

Mr Biden said at the time that if Mr Trump was “the only one saying it, that’s one thing. But the acolytes that follow him, like Cruz and others, they’re as responsible as he is”.

“There are decent people out there who actually believe these lies because they’ve heard it again and again.”

“The American public has a real good, clear look at who they are,” he told the press at the time. “They’re part of the big lie. The big lie.”

The neo-Nazi rally that inspired Biden to run

Mr Biden has said that his outrage at the neo-nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, after which Mr Trump, as president, said there were “very fine people on both sides” even after the death of a counter-protester, was the moment he decided to run.

At a fundraiser in 2019 after his campaign launch, Mr Biden said, "When those folks came out of the fields carrying those torches, chanting the anti-Semitic bile and their veins bulging, accompanied by the Ku Klux Klan, with such ugliness … I never thought I’d see something like that again in my life. That’s when I decided”.

In his 2019 campaign announcement video, Mr Biden said about Mr Trump’s response to the event: “In that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”