Biden’s 2024 re-election team accused former President Donald Trump of using the word “vermin” to describe his political rivals, a term that Nazi German leader Adolf Hitler also used.

At a New Hampshire rally on Saturday, Trump said he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” repeating his untrue allegation that he lost the 2020 presidential election because of fraud.

His remarks, which he made on the Veterans Day weekend to honor military veterans, were met with online backlash, with some historians saying his language resembled that of autocrats who have tried to dehumanise their enemies.

Biden campaign spokesperson Ammar Moussa said in a statement, “On a weekend when most Americans were honoring our nation’s heroes, Donald Trump echoed the autocratic language of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini — two dictators many US veterans sacrificed their lives to fight.”

Donald Trump believes that he can succeed by splitting our nation. He’s mistaken, and he’ll discover how mistaken he is next November.”

The comparisons to Hitler and Italy’s Mussolini were dismissed by Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump campaign. “The ones who make that absurd claim are obviously snowflakes who are desperate for anything because they have Trump Derangement Syndrome and their pathetic, unhappy lives will be destroyed when President Trump comes back to the White House,” Cheung said on Monday.

Snowflake is a word that is used to insult a person as being too sensitive or easily upset.”

Trump, who leads the race for the Republican nomination to face Biden in the 2024 presidential election, has a long track record of using inflammatory language to portray his perceived adversaries. He recently said to a conservative news site that immigrants who came to the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country”.

White House spokesperson Andrew Bates also compared Trump’s use of the word “vermin” to Hitler and Mussolini.

“Terms like that about dissent would be alien to our founders, but terrifyingly familiar to American veterans who wore their country’s uniform in the 1940s,” Bates said in a statement.

Tim Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, said words like vermin have historically been used by autocrats to dehumanise their opponents and create a climate of fear.

“That is the language that we link to dictators. Dictators rule by fear,” said Naftali, a presidential historian. “Once you deprive your opponents of their humanity you are granting permission to violence against them.”