Former President Donald Trump was forced to delete a video from his Truth Social account that triggered outrage by including a headline referencing a “unified Reich.”
The 30-second video mused about what would happen if Trump, 77, wins the Nov. 5 election over President Biden.
The faint headline, “Strength significantly increased by the creation of a unified Reich,” could be seen at least twice in the clip, which appeared to remain up for almost 15 hours before its removal.
“This was not a campaign video,” Trump 2024 spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told The Post Tuesday. “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.”
“The real extremist,” Leavitt added, “is Joe Biden who has turned his back on Israel and the Jewish people by bowing down to radical antisemites and terrorist sympathizers in his party like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”
Other “future headlines” flashed in the video read “Economy booms,” “No more forever wars,” “Law & order restored,” and “Border is closed, 15 million illegal aliens deported.”
The video appeared to use an online template, titled “Newspaper Vintage History Headlines Promo” to highlight the potential effects of a Trump victory.
A German word meaning “kingdom” or “realm,” “Reich” is often associated with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, which he dubbed the “Third Reich” — a piece of twisted historiography that claimed Nazi Germany as the successor to the Holy Roman Empire and the pre-World War I German Empire.
Another reference in the Trump video appeared to be taken directly from a Wikipedia entry on World War I stating that “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”
The Associated Press first reported on the connection to the Wikipedia entry.
The Biden-Harris campaign wasted little time denouncing Trump over the post.
“Donald Trump is not playing games; he is telling America exactly what he intends to do if he regains power: rule as a dictator over a ‘unified Reich,’” spokesperson James Singer said in a statement.
“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 later followed up in another statement Tuesday, stressing the video post was “part of a pattern of his praise for dictators and echoing antisemitic tropes.”
“He’s a threat to our democracy and Americans must reject him and stand up for our democracy this November,” Singer added.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates called it “abhorrent, sickening, and disgraceful for anyone to promote content associated with Germany’s Nazi government under Adolf Hitler.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden would address the video directly later Tuesday, when he holds campaign events in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
“What I want to say more broadly is it is a abhorrent, sickening and disgraceful for anyone to promote content associated with Germany’s Nazi government under Adolf Hitler — just as it is disgraceful to dine with neo-Nazis and to say there are very fine people on both sides after Charlottesville,” she said.
In 2022, Trump ate with with Holocaust-denying white supremacist Nick Fuentes and rapper Kanye West at his Mar-a-Lago resort. The 45th president later denied knowing who Fuentes was.
The Biden campaign also raised questions about the Trump camp’s explanation for how the video got posted.
“Trump’s press secretary claims Trump’s ad calling for a ‘UNIFIED REICH’ was posted by a random unknown ‘staffer.’ Here is Trump saying that only he and his top right-hand man, Dan Scavino, have access to post on his social media accounts,” the campaign posted on X.
Trump has previously been criticized over statements referencing Nazi Germany.
Earlier this month, during a donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago, Trump called the Biden White House a “Gestapo administration,” according to NBC News.
In March, Trump suggested that if he wasn’t elected, there would be a “bloodbath” in the auto industry.
“We’re going to put a 100% tariff on every single car that comes across the line, and you’re not going to be able to sell those cars if I get elected. Now, if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it,” Trump fumed during a rally in Dayton, Ohio.
Back in December, during a rally in New Hampshire, the 45th president suggested that migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,” an echo of a passage in Hitler’s manifesto “Mein Kampf” that reads: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.”
Trump later doubled down on those remarks.
Meanwhile, former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly has alleged that his old boss stated that the notorious genocidal maniac “did some good things.”
Trump’s campaign has denied the claim and accused Kelly of “spreading lies.”