NEW YORK — A video posted on Donald Trump’s social media account included references to a “unified Reich” among hypothetical headlines if he won the elections in November.
The headline appears between messages flashing on the screen, such as “Trump wins!!” and “Economic booms!” Other headlines appear to be references to the First World War. The word “Reich” is often associated with Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, although references in the video Trump shared appear to be a reference to the formation of the modern Pan-German nation. unify smaller states into a single Reich, or empire, in 1871.
The 30-second video appeared Monday on Trump’s account at a time when the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, while trying to portray President Joe Biden as soft on anti-Semitism, has repeatedly faced criticism for using language and rhetoric associated with to Nazi Germany.
It was posted and shared on the former president’s Truth Social account while he was on a lunch break from his silent trial in Manhattan on Monday afternoon. By Tuesday morning, the video post had been deleted.
“This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random online account and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word while the president was in court,” Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s press secretary, said in a statement.
Biden, speaking at two fundraisers in Boston on Tuesday, singled out Trump’s posting of the video, painting it as part of a pattern of incendiary comments that sow discord in the country, saying, “this is the language Hitler’s – not America’s.” Biden’s campaign soon after released a short video online showing him appearing to watch the video on a cellphone, saying “Wow” and making a similar comment to the one he made at the fundraiser, adding: “He cares about staying in power . I care about you.”
Biden told a group of donors that this is not the first time Trump has “taken this path” and chided the former president for offering a “lame excuse that an employee did this.”
“He attacks his opponents like maggots,” Biden said. “He says immigrants are poisoning the blood of America. That’s a phrase used in Hitler’s Germany, not an American president.”
Earlier this month, Trump said at a fundraiser that Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” referring to the Nazi secret police force.
Trump previously used rhetoric echoing Adolf Hitler when he said immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country” and called his opponents “vermin.”
The former president also sparked widespread backlash for having dinner with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist in 2022 and for downplaying the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us!”
At least one of the headlines appearing in the video appears to be text copied verbatim from a Wikipedia entry on World War I: “German industrial strength and production increased significantly after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”
In one image, the headlines “Border closed” and “15 million illegal aliens deported” appear above smaller text with the start and end dates of the First World War.
The video appears to have been created by a meme creator who goes by the username Ramble_Rants.
The creator, who is part of a group of meme creators that The New York Times reported have previously collaborated with the Trump campaign, posted the video on the social platform X on Monday morning.
In a post on X, Ramble_Rants defended the video, arguing that it was about “American peace and prosperity.”
The user explained in a post that the newspaper clippings in the video were pre-selected as part of a template showing historical headlines from video company Envato Elements.
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Associated Press writers Ali Swenson and Seung Min Kim in Boston contributed to this report.
