He had dinner with a white supremacist. He has invoked theories adopted by the Nazis in their quest for racial purity.
His response to the white supremacist march in Charlottesville? There were “very good people on both sides. “
So this week, when a video on former President Trump's Truth Social account referenced a “unified Reich,” his opponents were prepared to attack.
The message of Trump's post was confusing, according to historians, but he used language more often associated with Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.
Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the video had been posted online without the former president's approval by a junior staffer while Trump was in court. She went up while Trump was on his lunch break.
“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,” Leavitt said in a statement to the Associated Press. .
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Still, Democrats and even some Republicans claimed that, whatever the intention or cause, the video showed that as Trump seeks to retake the White House, he often quotes, invokes or is connected to Nazi and far-right language and images. .
“If you understand fascism, you have five alarm bells ringing in your head,” former Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci said this week on MSNBC.
Scaramucci added that the people raising money for the Trump campaign (mostly men, not women) “do so for superficial personal financial interests. “They don't understand the full balance of what's at stake here regarding the separation of powers in the United States.”
Biden used the “Unified Reich” video to repeat a theme he frequently invokes: the dire implications of a second Trump term.
“This is not the first time Trump has taken this path,” Biden said at a fundraiser in Boston on Tuesday. “Friends, it couldn't be clearer. “The threat Trump poses is greater the second time than the first.”
In a video posted to social media on Tuesday, Biden is seen watching the video of Truth Social's post reacting: “That's Hitler language. That's not from the United States. He cares about staying in power. I care about you.”
The video appeared on Trump's social media on Monday. The clip was taken from another account and showed fake newspaper headlines reading “Trump Wins! and “What's next for America?”
President Biden posted his own video responding to Trump's “Reich” video.
(Alex Brandon / Associated Press)
But on closer inspection, the video, which appears to have been made using an online template, includes headlines such as “INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH INCREASED SIGNIFICANTLY…DRIVEN BY THE CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH.”
The text that appears in the video comes from a Wikipedia entry on World War I. The idea of the unified Reich probably refers to the history preceding the founding of the Third Reich, when Hitler came to power in 1933. Still, the term “Reich,” which in German means kingdom or empire, has become closely associated with Hitler. and the massacre of Jews and other minorities.
Trump's critics point out that the reference to the Reich adds to a long series of comments and associations that echo Nazi ideology.
In December, Trump said in a speech that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country,” echoing Hitler's repeated invocations that Jews were “poisoning” Aryan Germans. Trump, at the time, said that he was unaware of the parallel and that he had never read Hitler's seminal text “Mein Kampf.”
During the 2020 campaign, he appeared to endorse “racehorse theory” in his speeches, the idea that selective breeding can improve a country's performance. This idea was fundamental to the Nazi notion of racial purity.
He also called his political opponents “vermin,” a term frequently used by the Nazis against their opponents. A recent report by journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser describes how Trump complained that U.S. military officers were not “totally loyal” to him and how he reportedly asked his then-chief of staff, retired Gen. Marine Corps John Kelly: “Why can't you be like the German generals?”
Kelly noted that Hitler's generals attempted to assassinate him, according to Glasser and Baker.
“Nazism, imperialism and dictatorship go against democracy,” said Tehama López Bunyasi, a George Mason professor who has studied how race and identity intersect with politics.
“The American people should be wary of any candidate who does not openly rebuke these three.”
White nationalist Nick Fuentes holds a rally in 2020.
(Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News)
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, president of the Center for Jewish History, said Trump's repeated flirtations with this kind of rhetoric and meetings with people like white nationalist Nick Fuentes condition people to look for subtler signs of anti-Semitism and parallels with Hitler. In 2022, Fuentes had dinner with Trump and rapper Kanye West, who now goes by Ye and has repeatedly made anti-Semitic comments in recent years.
Rosenfeld theorized that Reich's video could be “Gen Z employees on Trump's team who like to smuggle far-right icons in a 'where's Waldo?' style.” in the official messages of Trump and the Republican Party” as hidden messages for their far-right peers.
It wouldn't be the first time that has happened. Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' presidential campaign fired a staffer who made a video of the governor that invoked Nazi ideology.
Then there are social media posts that come from people not directly related to the campaigns. During the 2020 presidential race, Facebook removed a pro-Trump post that included an inverted red triangle, which was a symbol Nazis used to attack their opponents. The New York Times reported that the anonymous social media user who supposedly made the video had posted several times that its meaning was clear and that “there was no hidden secret message.”
For Rosenfeld, such messages have become too common. “We've been conditioned to see signs of fascism everywhere now,” Rosenfeld said, adding that there is plenty of evidence in his mind that a second Trump term would be “the most right-wing, bigoted and corrupt term of our lifetime.”
Thomas Weber, an expert on German history, noted that in modern Germany a far-right party has been largely copying parts of the Nazi party's manifesto.
“Anything to do with the blood of the people – that's Nazi language pure and simple,” said Weber, a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. The Reich video, however, is “more complicated,” he said.
The video imagines that in a second Trump term, there would be low taxes, “no more wars” and “economic booms.” These themes, Weber said, “resonate neither with the message of the Third Reich nor with that of imperial Germany.”
The video says that in a second Trump term, the border would be closed. That's not an exclusively Nazi idea or a Trumpian vision, Weber said, and neither is pushing for the outright expulsion of people deemed not to belong in a country.
The ideas expressed in Hitler's Germany are appearing, in one form or another, in many countries.
“It is not only Trump who is inadvertently copying Nazi policy, but the same is true of political parties and leaders throughout the Western world,” Weber said. “They don't seem to be clear to what extent they are echoing the platform of the Nazi party.”
