Transcript: Trump Explodes over Cratering Polls as GOP Losses Worsen

This is over the last couple of weeks. Trump said about Somalia there: “If you look at Somalia, they’re taking over Minnesota. We are not taking their people anymore.” Okay, that’s... there is nothing there about welfare fraud, about crime. It’s just, “We don’t like this country or anyone from it.” Another one: A reporter told him that Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, said he was proud to have a large Somalian community—a Somali community. Trump says, “I wouldn’t be proud.” He said that he’s a fool—about Frey. “I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian community.” That’s a quote from Donald Trump. “The Somalians, the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country.”

Imagine, Greg, if any politician in this country said that about the Jews, okay? It is absolutely of the same kind. And one more, he said—this was at his rally in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago—about the Somali immigrants in Minnesota: “They ought to get ’em the hell out of here. They don’t work. 91 percent unemployment”—that’s a fake stat—“The people from Somalia, they hate our country. The people.” So this is raw ethnic venom. And Trump is spewing it, and his crowds are endorsing it. I would love to believe, Greg, that there is going to be a backlash in this country to that, but I have not seen it yet.

Sargent: Well, maybe not to that yet, but what I guess I would point to is maybe what looks a little like a split-screen moment, right? On the one hand, I think it’s really true, as you point out, that broadly speaking, a lot of Americans are just not really tuned into the explicit ethnic persecution, the explicitly fascist nature of it. In other words, a lot of Americans probably hear this stuff and mostly say, It’s just Trump being crazy Trump, you know, and they’re not sort of saying to themselves, Holy shit, this is ethnic persecution. This is fascism.