Trump, who held office from 2017 to 2021, faces an array of legal troubles in criminal and civil cases while he seeks to regain the presidency in the Nov 5 election. He denies wrongdoing in all the cases.
Trump has made a series of inflammatory and racist statements on the campaign trail, using violent imagery to lambaste immigrants and opponents. He has warned of possible violence if he doesn’t win the 2024 election and has compared immigrants to animals.
In November, Biden attacked Trump for using the word “vermin” to refer to his political enemies, saying it echoed the language of Nazi Germany. Also last year, Trump said immigrants who entered the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Some historians say such comments mirror that of autocrats who have sought to dehumanise their foes. The Trump campaign has previously rejected comparisons to Nazis, Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini.
The Jewish Council for Public Affairs denounced the Nazi comparison on Sunday.
“It’s always wrong, offensive, and despicable to make comparisons like this – even more so when taken alongside the former president’s long history of normalising antisemitism,” said Amy Spitalnick, chief executive of the public policy group.
It was “especially heinous to use Nazi comparisons in the service of a bigoted, authoritarian agenda”, she said.
On Saturday night, Trump again took swipes at the federal and Georgia prosecutors working on cases against him, according to the media reports.
Trump, a former New York businessman and reality television host, described Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers as he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2016 election. He drew widespread criticism after a violent 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for equating white supremacists with counter-protesters and saying “both sides” were to blame.
Biden has said the events in Charlottesville, where one woman was killed, motivated him to run for president against Trump in 2020.
