Rolling Stone reports:

In the days following Donald Trump’s remarks that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” the 2024 GOP frontrunner was met with a wave of Democratic and media criticism, likening his speech to Nazi rhetoric. In response to the Adolf Hitler comparisons, Trump has privately vowed to further amp up the volume on his extreme, anti-immigrant messaging, according to two sources who’ve spoken to him since his rally in New Hampshire last weekend.

“He wants the media to choke on his words,” one of these sources says. “The [former] president said he’s going to keep doing it, he’s going to keep saying they’re poisoning the blood of the nation and destroying and killing the country … He says it’s a ‘great line.’” (Trump has been publicly using this specific phrase since at least September.)

According to the second source, Trump said in recent days that he was being “too nice” about the “animals” and alleged gang members who cross the southern border, whom Trump routinely accuses of flooding the United States with drugs, diseases, and violent crime. This person relays to Rolling Stone that Trump also said he and his campaign will be rolling out newer, even “tougher” policy proposals on immigration in 2024, and that his supporters should look out for them because they’ll be “very happy.” His current slate of 2024 immigration policy prescriptions include militarizing the southern border to a shocking degree, reimposing and expanding his travel “Muslim ban,” and building a vast network of new detention camps to house undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation.

It is no mystery why Trump’s hard-right, increasingly authoritarian rhetoric and policy promises have become a prime feature of his reelection bid. It’s not just music to the ears of various MAGAdonians, or the logical conclusion of his presidential campaign launch in 2015. It’s because there are more mainstream Republicans now — advising Trump, at influential think tanks and advocacy groups, or in positions of power in the House and Senate and elsewhere — openly embracing and encouraging his rhetoric.

Indeed, as The Des Moines Register reported, recent polling suggests Trump’s attacks on immigrants make many Republican Iowa caucusgoers more likely to support him, not less. [Continue reading…]