Sen. Bill Nelson Clarence (Bill) William NelsonDemocrats sound alarm on possible election chaos Trump, facing trouble in Florida, goes all in NASA names DC headquarters after agency's first Black female engineer Mary W. Jackson MORE (D-Fla.) during a campaign event over the weekend compared the heated U.S. political climate to the escalating "tribal" politics that preceded the Rwandan genocide, according to CNN.

Nelson made the comment after a week that saw an ardent Trump supporter send over a dozen explosives to high-profile Democrats and CNN, as well as a mass shooting in Pittsburgh that was reportedly the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.

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"When a place gets so tribal that the two tribes won't have anything to do with each other ... that jealousy turns into hate," Nelson said at an event in Florida City, Fla., according to CNN. "And we saw what happened to the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda, it turned into a genocide. A million-people hacked to death within a few months. And we have got to watch what's happening here."

He said the Rwandan genocide could be "instructive" to people in the U.S.

The 1990s Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi people is widely considered one of the worst mass slaughters in history, with an estimated 800,000 people killed over the course of three months. An estimated 70 percent of the Tutsi population was wiped out during the genocide.

Nelson campaign spokesman Dan McLaughlin told CNN that Nelson frequently "uses Rwanda as an extreme example of what could happen when a nation becomes totally divided."

"Sen. Nelson and his wife, Grace, have spoken about events in Rwanda for years, because of his wife's personal relationships there and his own trip to the country," McLaughlin told the network. Nelson's wife has a personal relationship with Rwandan first lady Jeannette Kagame. "He wasn't likening the current political climate in America to what was happening right before the Rwandan genocide," McLaughlin wrote in the statement.