'Vermin', 'Poisoning the Blood', 'the Enemy From Within': Campaign Rhetoric Against Opponents and Immigrants, 2023–2024

What happened

"Vermin" (November 11, 2023). At a Veterans Day rally in the Stevens High School auditorium in Claremont, New Hampshire, Trump said: "We will put America first and today, especially in honor of our great veterans on Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." Vox's fuller quotation continues: "that lie and steal and cheat on elections." Yale professor Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, said the passage was "textbook 'Mein Kampf'." Historian Jon Meacham warned that dehumanising an opponent opens the door "toward the most ghastly kinds of crimes." Campaign spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed the comparisons as coming from "snowflakes" with "Trump Derangement Syndrome" (ABC News).

"Poisoning the blood" (autumn 2023). In a video interview published by the right-leaning site The National Pulse, Trump said of undocumented immigrants: "It's poisoning the blood of our country. It's so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have." CNN noted that the phrase echoed white-supremacist rhetoric about blood purity and that Hitler wrote of "blood poisoning" in Mein Kampf. Trump repeated the line in a December speech and said he had never read Mein Kampf (Los Angeles Times).

"The enemy from within" (October 2024). In an interview aired by Fox News on October 13, 2024, asked about possible Election Day disruption, Trump said: "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think they're the big — and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can't let that happen." The previous day he had used the phrase about Rep. Adam Schiff (AP via PBS NewsHour).

Legal analysis

Rome Statute. No international crime is in play. Persecution (Art. 7(1)(h)) requires acts of persecution connected to another Art. 7 act within a widespread or systematic attack. These are a candidate's words while out of office, and the Rome Statute criminalises public incitement only for genocide. The crime type is none.

Human rights law. ICCPR Article 20(2) obliges states to prohibit advocacy of national or racial hatred amounting to incitement. The United States has reserved that the article requires no restriction of constitutionally protected speech, and the obligation binds the state, not individual speakers. Under domestic law these statements are protected political speech unless directed to and likely to produce imminent lawless action, and nothing in the sources fetched shows that.

Why the statements matter. Three features distinguish them from ordinary campaign invective. First, they deny the humanity of the targets ("vermin", contaminated "blood"), which the historians quoted by ABC News, and CNN in its reporting, linked to fascist and Nazi propaganda. Second, they name a sitting member of Congress as an internal enemy. Third, they pair that label with a proposal to use the National Guard and the military domestically. They were spoken by a candidate who then won the presidency, and the second term saw National Guard deployments to US cities and prosecutions of Trump's critics. Those are recorded in the related entries.

Strongest defence argument. This was heated campaign rhetoric aimed at "the radical left" and illegal immigration, protected by the First Amendment. "Vermin" and "enemy from within" were metaphors, not plans, and no violence followed from these particular statements in the sources reviewed. The defence is correct that these statements are not crimes and caused no documented direct harm, which is why the grade is the lowest on the scale. It does not change the content of the statements or their relevance as evidence of intent.

Why this grade

Significant. Rhetoric is not an act, and this entry records rhetoric only. The significant grade explicitly covers "rhetoric that normalizes political violence" without a rights violation against a specific victim class. These were statements by a candidate out of office, and no concrete harm is tied to them in the sources fetched. The entry is kept as documented intent behind later conduct, such as domestic deployments (National Guard deployments) and the prosecution of political opponents. No international crime is in play, so the entry carries no warCrimeClassification.