May 22, 2024 01:22 PM UTC

Trump's Third Reich Rhetoric is No Accident

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• by: Colorado Pols

Here’s a simple question: How many times in your life have you “accidentally” used language similar to the rhetoric familiar to Nazi Germany and the Third Reich?

We’re guessing the most common answer would be “never.”

Talking like a Nazi isn’t at all similar to mistakenly hitting “reply all” on an email. Heck, most people wouldn’t use the word “reich” in a sentence on purpose.

Most people, however, are not Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

As The New York Times reports:

Former President Donald J. Trump posted a video on Monday afternoon that features images of hypothetical newspaper articles celebrating a 2024 victory for him and referring to “the creation of a unified Reich” under the headline “What’s next for America?”

The 30-second video, which Mr. Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, features several articles styled like newspapers from the early 1900s — and apparently recycling text from reports on World War I, including references to “German industrial strength” and “peace through strength.” One article in the video asserts that Mr. Trump would deport 15 million migrants in a second term, while text onscreen lists the start and end days of World War I.

Another headline in the video suggests that Mr. Trump in a second term would reject “globalists,” using a term that has been widely adopted on the far right and that scholars say can be used as a signal of antisemitism.

The Trump campaign said in a statement that the video had been posted by a staff member while Mr. Trump was in his criminal trial in Manhattan. The video was still up on his account early Tuesday, and his campaign did not respond to a question late Monday about why it had not been taken down. It was then deleted sometime Tuesday morning.

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign says the video — which you can see here — was merely an unfortunate mistake from an unnamed staffer who didn’t notice the repeated references to the phrase “unified reich.” There are a couple of problems with this explanation.

For one thing, Trump has gone out of his way to make it clear that only he and Senior Adviser Dan Scavino have access to the @realDonaldTrump account on Truth Social. It’s tough to swallow the excuse that some random staff member has the ability to post under Trump’s account — particularly given how much Trump loves vomiting out his thoughts at all hours of the day.

The other issue, of course, is that Trump is no stranger to this sort of language in general. As The Associated Press explains further:

Earlier this month, Trump said at a fundraiser that Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” referring to the secret Nazi police force.

Trump previously used rhetoric echoing Adolf Hitler when he said immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and called his opponents “vermin.”

The former president has also drawn wide backlash for having dined with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist in 2022 and for downplaying the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us!”

Nazi rhetoric from Trump and his campaign is a feature, not a bug. As Maya Angelou once said, When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.