Trump under fire for posting ‘unified Reich’ video message
DONALD Trump has been accused of evoking language used by Nazi Germany after his social media account shared a video claiming he will create a “unified Reich” if he is re-elected.
The video, which has now been removed, features a voiceover that asks: “What happens after Donald Trump wins? What’s next for America?”
It then shows images of fake newspaper headlines.
One of these includes a subheading that reads: “Industrial strength significantly increased driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”
Staffer
The term Reich, German for empire, became synonymous with Nazi Germany.
President Joe Biden accused Trump of using “Hitler’s language”, claiming it is “not the first time he has gone down this road”.
Speaking to a group of donors, he added: “He attacks his opponents as vermin. He says immigrants are poisoning the blood of America. That’s a line used in Hitler’s Germany, not by an American president.”
However, the Trump campaign has distanced itself and the former president from the video.
Officials have said it was not created by the campaign and had been reposted by a “staffer” who did not see the word
Reich. They also noted that the video was posted while Trump himself was in court. The former president is defending accusations in New York that he falsified business records to cover up an alleged “hush money” payment to the adult film actress Stormy Daniels, shortly before the 2016 election.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said: “This was not a campaign video.
“It was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the president was in court.
“The real extremist is Joe Biden, who has turned his back on Israel and the Jewish people by bowing down to radical antisemites and terrorist sympathizers in his party like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
While Hitler did discuss creating an enlarged German empire in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, the text from the video shared on Truth Social may have been taken from the Wikipedia page for the First World War.
The website text reads: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”
Unification of Germany in 1871 brought together an assortment of German-speaking territories.