Former Mexican president Felipe Calderon attends the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting in New York, in this file photo dated September 28, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – U.S. Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s political rhetoric is “racist,” and evocative of Adolf Hitler, former Mexican President Felipe Calderon told reporters at an event in Mexico City on Saturday.
“This logic of praising the white supremacy is not just anti-immigration,” Calderon said. “He is acting and speaking out against immigrants that have a different skin colour than he does, it is frankly racist and [he is] exploiting feelings like Hitler did in his time,” Calderon said.
Trump has accused Mexico of sending rapists and drug runners across the U.S. border and has said he will make Mexicans pay for a wall on the border.
Felipe Calderon was president of Mexico from 2006-12.
Former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Calderon’s predecessor, also compared Trump to Hitler in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
“He reminds me of Hitler,” Fox told Cooper on Friday.
(Reporting by Joanna Zuckerman Bernstein and Luis Rojas, editing by G Crosse)