The Democratic campaign team vigorously attacked Donald Trump on Monday, May 20, after the publication of a video on one of his social network accounts mentioning a “unified Reich” among fictitious newspaper headlines celebrating advances the victory of the Republican presidential candidate.
“What will happen after Donald Trump wins? What to expect for America,” asks the voice-over of this thirty-second video, published by Donald Trump’s account on his Truth Social platform, displaying imaginary press headlines. While newspapers headline “The economy is booming! » or “The border is closed”, a press headline reports “the creation of a unified Reich”, a term generally used in reference to Nazi Germany.
No other reference to Nazism is otherwise visible in the video. In these images, which combine blurred extracts of text in the background with the appearance of newspaper articles, allusions to the First World War are made.
Recurring criticisms
Donald Trump has a “long history” of anti-Semitic behavior, Democratic President Joe Biden’s campaign team wrote in a scathing statement. “Donald Trump doesn’t play games. He is telling America exactly what he plans to do if he returns to power: rule as a dictator a ‘unified Reich,'” Democratic campaign spokesman James Singer wrote in a statement. accusing him of “parodying Mein Kampf,” the political manifesto of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, and of “disturbed behavior.” According to the Politico news site, a member of Donald Trump’s team claimed not to have seen the word “Reich” before the publication of these images.
Donald Trump regularly explains that his rival, Joe Biden, has failed to stem anti-Semitism in the United States in the context of the war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But the former Republican leader is sometimes criticized for his use of rhetoric reminiscent of Nazism, notably when he refers to immigrants as “vermin” who “poison the blood” of the United States.
In 2017, while in the White House, Mr. Trump called people involved in clashes between anti-racists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, “very good people,” on both sides.
In June 2020, the social network Facebook removed advertisements published by Donald Trump’s American electoral campaign which attacked the far left by displaying an inverted red triangle, the symbol used by the Nazis to designate political prisoners in concentration camps.