Bloody Hell

The remarks “poisoning the blood of our country” are straight out of Hitler’s 1925 autobiographical manifesto, “Mein Kampf” — his blueprint for a “pure Aryan" Germany and the removal of Jews.
Axios Explains: The racist history of Trump’s “poisoning the blood”

Pearls = Clutched.

The continued fascination, if not obsession with Donald Trump’s racism and/or race baiting, and the unwillingness of the Republican Party as a whole to come out against same is, by now, a well-known phenomenon. And, of course, the campaign to re-elect President Biden wants to keep harping on it.

“Every time he says it, we are going to call it out,” said Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign’s communications director. “He’s going to echo the rhetoric of Hitler and Mussolini, and we’re going to make sure that people understand just how serious that is every single time.”
Why Biden’s campaign keeps linking Trump to Hitler

Okay. So people know. Now what?

There’s a pretense at work here, the same one that pops up whenever the response to some tragic act or another is “this is not who we are.” A pretense that states that bad actions, and bad rhetoric, are only the preserve of people who themselves are objectively bad.

Rejection of ideas like all of humanity are brethren, or the content of one’s character is independent of the color of one's skin (or the faith one follows), is not new. Often, it’s borne of the idea that others represent a threat to the in-group that the in-group itself does not, or can not, represent to those others. Consider this passage from Deuteronomy:

Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.
Deuteronomy 7:3-4 New International Version (NIV)

Note the concern here, supposedly put forth directly by the Abrahamic god, that Jews who marry Gentiles will be turned to other faiths, rather than being able to bring their new spouses into Judaism. This is pretty much the same thought process that underlies Mr. Trump’s “poisoning the blood of our country” remarks.

So when the Biden campaign decides that they’re going to make it a point to constantly remind people that Donald Trump’s rhetoric carries shades of Adolf Hitler, the goal there is what? Somehow shame Republican voters into being more courageous in the face of what they see as an existential threat? That hasn’t worked so far. Remind Democrats of who they're up against? I can’t imagine that any of them have forgotten. Convince the marginally-attached or swing voters to turn out for Biden? That’s not how negative campaigning has ever worked.

The problem with making racists out to be monsters is that people come to only see those they understand as monsters to be racists. And while the fears of many conservative Americans may not resonate with people outside of those circles, that doesn't mean that the people who hold those fears don't see them as valid. And so they don't see themselves as monsters (and, accordingly, as racists). And this explains why Republican politicians aren't lining up to call Donald Trump out on this. (Senator Mitch McConnell’s wry comment that, as President, Donald Trump was fine having McConnell’s Taiwanese wife in his Cabinet was pretty good, however.) When Senator J. D. Vance says that comparisons between Mr. Trump and Adolf Hitler are “preposterous,” he’s standing up for Republican voters who are willing to buy into the belief that a person’s values and ethics have a strong correlation with national or ethnic origin, but who are unwilling to see themselves as anything like the ethno-nationalists of 1930s Germany. After all, only a monster could have thought that following Adolf Hitler was a good idea.

And that’s what makes hammering on this so pointless. Not that people's minds are already made up, but that their self-images are already set. I think that the back and forth over Trumpian rhetoric has become about virtue signalling, and, as such, statements only really land with people when they align with that person's conception of virtue. And as conceptualizations of virtue become more openly partisan, attempts to appeal to shared values are going to be less and less effective.