Donald Trump is under fire after a video shared Monday on his Truth Social account appears to suggest he’d create a “unified Reich” if he is re-elected in November.
The 30-second video shared on the former president’s social media platform begins with a narrator describing hypothetical scenarios for a possible second Trump administration.
“What happens after Donald Trump wins?” a narrator says before an animation featuring newspaper front pages begins flashing on the screen, showing what the president says he’ll accomplish with a second term.
Headlines, some of which appear to be a reference to World War I, imagine a future with a booming economy, lower taxes, and “law and order restored.”
Another headline touts the deportation of 15 million undocumented immigrants, which the narrator refers to as “the largest deportation in history,” while the start and end days of WWI appear on the screen.
But it was the text that appears briefly on-screen under the “What’s Next for America” headline that has sparked a major backlash: “Industrial strength significantly increased … driven by the creation of a unified Reich” — a term commonly used to describe Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said the language was a clear sign Trump intends “to rule as a dictator” if re-elected.
“Parroting ‘Mein Kampf’ while you warn of a bloodbath if you lose is the type of unhinged behavior you get from a guy who knows that democracy continues to reject his extreme vision of chaos, division, and violence,” Singer said in a statement shared on social media.
The ad echoes Nazi Germany, the Biden-Harris campaign said on X, sharing two screenshots of the video.
Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a “UNIFIED REICH,” echoing Nazi Germany pic.twitter.com/z4ZmMSWuRH
— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 21, 2024
Trump’s campaign press secretary responded to the backlash by saying the post 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,” Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
Trump, who has been spending most of his weekdays in criminal court in Manhattan during testimony in his hush money trial, was reportedly on his lunch break when the video was shared on his Truth Social account.
The video, which was posted around 2 p.m., was only taken down Tuesday morning after being on the platform for more than 18 hours.
With News Wire Services
