NEW YORK — Donald Trump posted a video to his social media account on Monday that talked about possible news stories about a “unified Reich” if he wins the election in November.
The headline is shown along with messages like “Trump wins!!” and “Economy booms!” that flash across the screen. It looks like some of the headlines are about World War I.
People usually think of Nazi Germany’s Third Reich when they hear the word “Reich.” But the references in the video Trump shared seem to be about how the modern pan-German nation was formed in 1871, when smaller states were united into a single Reich, or empire.
The 30-second video showed up on Trump’s account at a time when he was trying to make President Joe Biden look weak on antisemitism while being criticized for using Nazi-era language and rhetoric.
It was shared and posted on the former president’s Truth Social account while he was eating lunch away from his hush-money trial in Manhattan.
Officials for the campaign said in a statement that the video was not made by the campaign but by a random online account and then shared by a worker who clearly did not see the word while the President was in court.
To raise money earlier this month, Trump said that Biden is in charge of a “Gestapo administration,” a reference to the secret Nazi police force.
In the past, Trump used language similar to that of Adolf Hitler when he said that illegal immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and called his opponents “germs.”
A lot of people don’t like that the former president ate with a white nationalist in 2022 who denied the Holocaust and played down the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us!”
At least one of the video’s flashing headlines looks like it was taken straight from a Wikipedia page about World War I: “The creation of a unified Reich in 1871 led to a big rise in Germany’s industrial strength and production.”
The words “Border Is Closed” and “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” are written above smaller text that shows the beginning and end dates of World War I in one picture.
