Trump Shares ‘Unified Reich’ Campaign Video During Lunch Break
The 30-second video was shared on his Truth Social account while he was on a lunch break from his hush-money trial.
Donald Trump’s Truth Social account has boosted a campaign video that spoke of a “unified Reich” in America if he reclaims the White House in the November election.
The 30-second video, which was finally taken down Tuesday after it remained up for 15 hours despite growing outrage, features a series of headlines predicting “what happens after Donald Trump wins,” with answers like, “Economy booms!” and “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported.” One headline referenced the “creation of a unified Reich,” using a term meaning “realm” or “empire” that is usually associated with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in Nazi Germany.
The Biden campaign reacted to the video with alarm on Monday night, with campaign spokesman James Singer accusing Trump of “parroting Mein Kampf” in a statement posted to X.
“America, stop scrolling and pay attention. 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,’” Singer wrote.
Amid the controversy, Trump’s campaign said Trump himself had nothing to do with the video and that it had been inadvertently shared by a staffer while the former president was on lunch break from his hush-money trial in Manhattan on Monday.
“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,” campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, adding that “the real extremist is Joe Biden” for having supposedly “turned his back on Israel and the Jewish people.”
Trump social media video references 'unified reich'
Former president Donald Trump shared a video May 20 on Truth Social suggesting his reelection would bring 'unified Reich'. Trump’s ‘reich’ video, Biden’s pandemic and political smoke detectors
May 21, 2024 at 10:09 a.m. EDT
Mini-gaffes generate social media attention and validate preconceptions.
What first caught my eye in the video that was posted to Donald Trump’s account at Truth Social, the social media platform he owns, was an imaginary newspaper headline celebrating the deportation of immigrants should he win this November’s election.
Below that, a date: 28 July 1914 — 11 November 1918.
You will perhaps notice that a second Trump term would unfold not in the 1910s but the 2020s. If you are particularly attuned to world history, you may also notice that the indicated dates are actually the dates marking the beginning and end of World War I. In fact, you can see a mention of World War I in the background text at upper left; it mentions that the conflict is often abbreviated as “WWI.”
That same text snippet is also visible in the “peace through strength” bit of the video, too.
These are pretty clear hallmarks of placeholder text from stock footage. The advantage of newspapers over video is that you can pack a lot more information into a small space, but this means that those showing newspapers (or magazines or books or whatever) on screen have to come up with dummy text to make the thing look real. In movies, they’ll have someone write something that looks real but doesn’t draw attention. At other times, someone will just pull from some similarly inoffensive source — like, say, an encyclopedia entry on a global conflict.
There’s just one problem: Sometimes those entries contain snippets that might be overlooked until someone looks closely. Like a mention of a “unified reich.”
It’s not hard to see why that word, on that screen, would generate attention. “What’s next for America” followed by a hard-to-read sentence that ends in “reich,” a word used to describe the empire envisioned by Nazi Germany? Coming from Donald Trump?
Looking more closely, though, it’s clear that the video isn’t saying that “what’s next” is an American reich. The full sentence says that “industrial strength significantly increased … driven by the creation of a unified reich.” This, too, is a reference to world history, and the evolution of German power in the decades before World War I. That this is just more dummy text is made more obvious by its inclusion in the final page of “newsprint” shown in the video.
The Trump campaign asserts that it didn’t make the video but, instead, that it was made by a supporter and reshared by the former president’s account. (It’s not clear whether Trump himself posted the video; it was published during a break in his Manhattan criminal trial.)
Such things have happened before. In 2015, Trump blamed a social media post insulting Iowans on a “young intern.” The following February, he reshared an unattributed quote from the fascist leader Benito Mussolini. That July, his campaign spent days dealing with the fallout of his resharing an image including antisemitic tropes. Then, as now, it seemed more likely that Trump or his team were insufficiently attentive to what they were sharing than that they were intentionally sending a weird, coded wink to their followers. And then, as now, doing so triggered a flurry of criticisms and suggestions that the shared material was deeply revealing of intent.
The Trump video arrived on the heels of a similar flare-up for President Biden. During a speech in Michigan over the weekend, Biden offered an anecdote intended to show his affection for the city of Detroit and its leadership.
“When I was vice president,” Biden said, “things were kind of bad during the pandemic, and what happened was Barack said to me, ‘Go to Detroit and help fix it.’ Well, poor mayor, he spent more time with me than he ever thought he was going to have to.”
There was a pandemic when Barack Obama was president; in 2009, the H1N1 influenza virus reached that status and Biden was tasked with the government’s response. (This was a common point of comparison among Trump supporters during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.) But Biden misspoke, as the White House transcript indicates; he meant “recession.”
Fox News wrote a story about the mistake, as did the New York Post and other right-wing outlets.
There are two advantages for partisans in elevating such stories. The more obvious is to embarrass their opponents. The other is slightly more subtle, using such stories to reinforce existing assumptions about the other party’s presidential candidate.
To his critics, Biden’s gaffe is the smoke that proves the fire: He is insufficiently mentally capable to serve as president for another four years. To Trump’s critics, the “reich” video plays the same role: It shows that he is sympathetic to the fascism that defined Nazi Germany — or at least, his supporters are.
We live in a moment where this sort of smoke detection, if you will, is rampant. It’s not new that political candidates and their supporters would seek out gaffes on the part of their opponents. It is new, though, that so many people would be engaged in the gaffe-seeking economy, in serving as smoke detectors that might demonstrate the presence of a conflagration. Anyone, these days, is empowered to have an international audience in the manner that was once reserved for substantial news organizations, so anyone interested in undermining a candidate for president can pore over videos or transcripts and pick out things that might serve as that smoke or otherwise embarrass the candidate. And there are rewards for doing so: the tainted, jinxed currency of social media attention.
Americans have valid concerns about how Trump intends to wield power, should he return to the White House, and about how Biden’s age might affect his job performance. Those points of weakness increase the social value of finding proof of those flaws and — in classic supply-and-demand fashion — increase the supply of examples.
We are a nation littered with political smoke detectors, constantly blaring. The type of smoke detectors, mind you, where you can’t simply take out the battery.
Update: A person who does motion graphics and video editing work emailed with a link to the stock footage used in the video Trump shared. This person noted that they’d used the same template recently, noting that the designer of the Trump video had apparently not swapped out the filler text included by default.
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