Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio called former Mexican President Vicente Fox “disgusting” for saying Donald Trump echoes Adolf Hitler, during a Sunday radio interview.
“I just can’t believe what this guy has done and I can’t believe why our country hasn’t gone bananas against him and the Mexican government,” asserted Arpaio.
Arpaio took aim at the U.S. government, saying Congress and other American officials only react to the “sensitivity about illegal immigration,” thus allowing former president Fox to stick “his nose into the election.”
The famous sheriff was interviewed for “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and Philadelphia’s NewsTalk 990 AM.
Klein asked the Maricopa County sheriff what he thought of Fox’s remarks, made in an interview last week with CNN.
Arpaio responded:
Disgusting. They are going after Trump over some KKK. Our own country, our own officials. Of course they will do anything to get him to feed it. But I want to know why. Here is the former president of Mexico calling Trump, a presidential candidate regardless of who the person is. These are people running for president in our country. He is sticking his nose into the election. Calling a candidate Hitler and everything else.
And I want to know, where is Congress? Where is the uproar in this country allowing this guy to get away with it. It’s disgusting, really disgusting why we don’t go after that guy. That shows you they don’t want to aggravate Mexico. They don’t care about the drug traffic. All they care about really is the sensitivity about illegal immigration. So it’s disgusting.
I’m very sad since I spent all my over four years in Mexico City dealing with the presidents and the attorneys general. And I just can’t believe what this guy has done and I can’t believe why our country hasn’t gone bananas against him and the Mexican government.
Speaking to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a phone interview, Fox made the controversial statements likening Trump to the Nazi murderer.
“Today, he’s going to take that nation [U.S.] back to the old days of conflict, war, and everything. I mean, he reminds me of Hitler. That’s the way he started speaking,” Fox said.
“He has offended Mexico, Mexicans, immigrants. He has offended the Pope. He has offended the Chinese. He’s offended everybody.”
Fox made the remarks one day after he slammed Trump’s plan to force Mexico to pay for a barrier along the 1,954-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border.
“I’m not going to pay for that f***ing wall,” Fox said, speaking to Fusion television.
Also last week, another former Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, slammed Trump’s rhetoric against illegal immigration as “racist” and claimed the GOP frontrunner is evoking Hitler.
“This logic of praising the white supremacy is not just anti-immigration,” said Calderon, who served as president of Mexico from 2006 to 2012
“He is acting and speaking out against immigrants that have a different skin color than he does. It is frankly racist and [he is] exploiting feelings like Hitler did in his time,” Calderon said.
Arpaio has appeared at several Trump campaign events to stump for the candidate. In January, he formally endorsed the billionaire businessman for president.
On July 1, 2015, Arpaio took to Klein’s show to make his first public remarks in support of Trump, defending Trump’s statements about illegal immigrants.
Arpaio stated, “There’s no lie about the drugs coming from Mexico.”
“Everybody knows that,” he said at the time. “I talk about it all the time. The majority of the drugs coming into my county, they are from Mexico. So that’s a true statement.”
During that interview, which was linked at the popular Drudge Report, Arpaio said he did not believe Trump meant “to say anything derogatory about all the great people from Mexico.”
Three weeks later, Arpaio again went on Klein’s show to suggest that Trump accompany him on a trip to Mexico to “straighten out the illegal immigration and drug-smuggling problem.”