Donald Trump has now denied ever having read Adolf Hitler’s 1925 memoir-manifesto Mein Kampf as he faces a firestorm over his recent run of anti-immigrant comments, which have been likened to the Nazi leader’s infamous “blood and soil” rhetoric.
The former president returned to the campaign trail in Waterloo, Iowa, on Tuesday evening where he doubled down on his earlier inflammatory remarks.
“It’s crazy, what’s going on. They’re ruining our country. And it’s true. They are destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They are destroying our country,” he said.
“They don’t like it when I said that,” he added, before denying browsing Hitler’s book.
“And I never read Mein Kampf. They said, ‘Oh, Hitler said that’. In a much different way,” he said.
I don’t think Trump reads many books overall. He probably just heard the quote somewhere and didn’t bother to check it before using it as his own. I’m writing this off as an unsurprising symptom of his lack of intelligence.
Trump, rather famously, can only be confirmed to have owned one book, and it is Mein Kampf.
That said, I can indeed still believe he didn’t finish it, even if he remembers a couple quotes.