Donald Trump isn't being subtle. At a New Hampshire event on Saturday, he claimed that immigrants (in a nation of immigrants, no less) are "poisoning the blood of our country.” Yet it wasn't the first time his rhetoric parroted Adolf Hitler's genocidal manifesto, "Mein Kampf."

Trump's dry run for using the phrase came in September during an interview with the right-wing website The National Pulse. Now Trump is casually dropping Nazisms at campaign rallies even as his top aides and allies try to gaslight the media into downplaying Trump's autocratic devotions.

The Biden campaign has taken note, directly linking Trump's remarks to Hitler four times in the last six weeks, according to Politico. Just hours after Trump's Saturday rally, Biden's director of rapid response, Ammar Moussa, released a statement charging that Trump "channeled his role models as he parroted Adolf Hitler, praised Kim Jong Un, and quoted Vladimir Putin while running for president on a promise to rule as a dictator and threaten American democracy."

To date, the Biden campaign’s responses have mostly been written statements, though President Joe Biden recently told attendees at a San Francisco fundraiser that Trump's statement "echoes language you heard in Nazi Germany in the 30s."

But even without Biden publicly driving the message, the campaign's quick responses have helped generate a substantial amount of earned media.

"If you were to open up a copy of Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf,’ you would find the Nazi leader describing the mixing of non-Germans with Germans as 'poisoning,'" CNN's Jake Tapper said in a Monday monologue, explaining that Hitler framed the mixing as an "existential threat" to Germany. "There’s really no other way to say it: Donald Trump’s language mirrors [Hitler’s] directly."

Potentially vulnerable Republicans have also been forced to defend Trump's fascist rhetoric (or not, in some cases).

Also on Monday, Staten Island Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis argued in a CNN interview that Trump wasn't actually talking about immigrants poisoning America. "He was talking about the Democratic policies," she said.

Of course, no one believes Malliotakis’ opinion here. In fact, Trump specifically name-checked the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America when he talked about immigrants "pouring into our country."

Importantly, for now, Team Biden's pushback on Trump's autocratic vision for America is feeding the media beast and putting Republicans on defense.

As the 2024 campaign takes shape next year, Biden himself will have to be more direct about Trump's intention to end democracy as we know it. In 2022, exit polls found that nearly 7 in 10 voters viewed democracy as "threatened," including 50% of Democrats and 48% of Republicans. But later analysis by VoteCast found that voters who favored Democrats were far more motivated by the issue. The nationwide survey of more than 90,000 voters showed that "Democratic congressional candidates won roughly 6 in 10 voters who said the future of democracy was their ‘single most important’ factor, while about 4 in 10 backed Republican candidates," according to the Associated Press.

So while Trump's idea of being a dictator on “day one” might be selling like hotcakes to the MAGA faithful in the Republican primary, it's a general election killer for Republicans.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.