'It’s inevitable': Columnist warns Trump's move to the right is just getting started

Donald Trump's comments during a recent rally in New Hampshire need to be taken seriously because, even if he doesn't win the presidency, his words are having "a destabilizing political impact" on the nation, CNN's Stephen Collinson wrote Tuesday.

According to Collinson, even if people are skeptical of the meaning behind Trump latest speech — compared to Hitler's Mein Kampf because he suggested immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of America — "his aberrant behavior also requires an understanding of his inflammatory aims and a sober evaluation of the exact threat he poses to democratic values around the world, which are under threat from autocracies in China, Russia, Iran and elsewhere."

Collinson claims that Trump is exaggerating the threat from undocumented immigrants in order to capitalize on President Joe Biden's failure to control the surge of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and acknowledges that "Republicans have long argued the situation is a crisis, and the White House hasn’t come up with a political narrative to counter that."

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Amid his inflammatory rhetoric, Trump is becoming more and more extreme, and "it’s inevitable that new efforts to prove himself will drive him further to the right-wing fringe of US politics," Collinson contended.

Trump, like other authoritarians, erodes "political and electoral systems to enhance their own power and weaken the press and the courts," Collinson wrote, adding that Trump's extremism poses serious questions for his primary opponents, who haven't quite mustered the courage to call him out directly for fear of alienating GOP voters.

"After his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and as he conjures the darkest and most divisive rhetoric of any modern election, there can be little doubt about who Trump is and how he might behave in a second term," he wrote.

Read the full op-ed over at CNN.