Former Texas congressman and current 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke compared rhetoric from the White House to language rampant in Germany during the Third Reich, in which Jews and other minorities were compared to vermin.
At a campaign event in Iowa on Thursday, reflecting on a question that a Mexican-American third-grader asked O’Rourke after U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 as to “why the president doesn’t like” her, O’Rourke told the audience, “What is that doing to her head, and to her perception of herself and what she’s able to contribute this country, when the president of the United States has called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals?”
“He [Trump] then went on to call asylum-seekers animals and an infestation,” continued O’Rourke. “Now we would not be surprised if in the Third Reich, other human beings were described as an infestation, as a cockroach or a pest that you would want to kill.”