Presidential candidate Donald Trump has released a video on social media mentioning the United Reich among possible scenarios if he wins the election. President Joe Biden and his team criticized his opponent's strange move, reports NBC News.
On Monday, May 20, Trump posted a 30-second video on his Truth Social page, asking, "what happens after Donald Trump wins?" and "what's next for America?".
The video featured headlines from newspapers with titles such as Border is closed - 15 million illegal aliens deported and Economy booms. In the clip, slightly blurred text appears twice under the headlines: "Industrial strength significantly increased ... driven by the creation of a unified Reich".
The video was removed on Tuesday morning.
Reich means kingdom, empire, or realm and is often associated with the Hitler regime of the Third Reich, which arose in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Current US President Joe Biden condemned Trump's mention of the Nazi regime in his video.
"Is this on his official account? Wow! A unified Reich? That's Hitler's language, that's not America's. He cares about holding on to power. I care about you," Biden said in his video on Tuesday and reiterated similar messages at a campaign event in Boston.
Joe Biden's campaign spokesperson, James Singer, stated that Trump's post is part of his pattern of praising dictators and repeating antisemitic tropes.
"He’s a threat to our democracy and Americans must reject him and stand up for our democracy this November," Singer said.
Trump's campaign dismissed the accusations, stating that the former president, who is being tried in New York, did not know the word appeared in the video.
"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," said Karoline Leavitt, Trump campaign spokeswoman.
"The real extremist is Joe Biden who has turned his back on Israel and the Jewish people by bowing down to radical anti-semites and terrorist sympathizers in his party like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez," she added.
While Hitler did discuss creating an extended German empire in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, the text from the video circulated on Truth Social appears to be taken from the Wikipedia page dedicated to World War I. The site states: "German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich."
The unification of Germany in 1871 brought together several German-speaking kingdoms and duchies that had remained independent after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
Another sentence in the video reads: "First World War (often abbreviated as WW1 or WWI) Causes of World War I."
Trump has used 20th-century German historical comparisons to attack his opponents: earlier this month, he likened the Biden administration to the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany.
Last year, Trump claimed that immigrants were poisoning the blood of America, echoing parts of Mein Kampf, but he said he did not know that Hitler used similar language and denied that his comments were racist.
Presidential election in the US
On November 5, 2024, the US is scheduled to hold its next presidential election. The main candidates are the incumbent President Joe Biden and the leader of the Republican Party, former President of the US from 2016 to 2020, Donald Trump.
Recently, the opponents agreed to hold two rounds of televised debates - one in the summer and the other in the fall.
Trump is demanding that Biden undergo a drug test before the televised debate.