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“Unified Reich”: Yet Another Nazi Motif Used in Trump Campaign UPDATED

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Donald Trump and his campaign have long been accused of using some Nazi motifs and welcoming Neo-Nazis into its fold. Now there’s yet another Nazi related Trump campaign controversy and it ignited a firestorm.

The supposed misunderstanding and/or mistake of the day hit the news when it was noticed that a Trump campaign video mentioned a “Unified Reich” if Trump wins. The AP story beest sums it up:

NEW YORK (AP) — A video posted to Donald Trump’s account on his social media network included references to a “unified Reich” among hypothetical news headlines if he wins the election in November.

The headline appears among messages flashing across the screen such as “Trump wins!!” and “Economy booms!” Other headlines appear to be references to World War I. The word “Reich” is often largely associated with Nazi Germany’s Third Reich, though the references in the video Trump shared appear to be a reference to the formation of the modern pan-German nation, unifying smaller states into a single Reich, or empire, in 1871.

The 30-second video appeared Monday on Trump’s account at a time when the presumptive Republican nominee for president, while seeking to portray President Joe Biden as soft on antisemitism, has himself repeatedly faced criticism for using language and rhetoric associated with Nazi Germany.

GO HERE to read the entire AP story.

Joe Biden was quick to respond. USA Today:

President Joe Biden slammed a 30-second video shared to Donald Trump’s Truth Social account on Monday that referenced a “unified reich” while featuring what the former president would do if he won a second term in office.

Trump’s video includes a narrator discussing “what’s next for America” with a Republican 2024 victory and presents a series of newspaper headlines and text describing his goals, such as closing the border and creating a booming economy. One piece of text in the since-deleted video said, “Industrial strength significantly increased … driven by the creation of a unified reich.”

Reich refers to a German empire and is associated with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich under Nazi Germany.

Karoline Leavitt, a Trump spokesperson, said in a statement that the video is not a campaign ad and 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,” referencing Trump’s hush money trial.

But Biden condemned the “unified Reich” reference Tuesday, telling supporters at a campaign fundraiser in Boston, “This is Hitler’s language, not America’s.”

After several hours the Trump campaign took the video down, but the damage was done. Trump’s campaign rhetoric has long been littered with seeming parallels to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric. Last year The Washington Post did an article detailing the similarities. It begins:

Donald Trump has long toyed with the language of famous autocrats, authoritarians and fascists. Think: “enemy of the people,” “retribution” and the frequent, years-long allusions to political violence.

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But even by his standards, the former president is now mining darker territory — with overtones of some of the ugliest episodes in recent world history.

The Washington Post this weekend summarized Trump’s Veterans Day speech in a headline thusly: “Trump calls political enemies ‘vermin,’ echoing dictators Hitler, Mussolini.”

Trump not only likened his political opponents to “vermin” but suggested they represent a “threat from within” that is more dangerous than threats from beyond our borders. Both are themes seized upon by strongmen to foment populist movements.

Trump’s campaign responded by seemingly taking issue with the “ridiculous” framing. But in the same breath, it also promised that Trump’s “snowflake” critics’ “entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.” (It later sought to amend that to “sad, miserable existence.”)

As that response indicates, the campaign is not exactly apologizing for this type of rhetoric, which is, at the very least and to be quite charitable, a calculated attempt at provocation. And after years of this kind of rhetoric and events like Jan. 6, you could certainly forgive people for worrying that it’s more than that.

“The language is the language that dictators use to instill fear,” Timothy Naftali, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, told The Post. “When you dehumanize an opponent, you strip them of their constitutional rights to participate securely in a democracy because you’re saying they’re not human. That’s what dictators do.”

Go to THIS LINK to read the whole article.

UPDATE: Ian Ward, writing in the Politico Nightly email offered by Politico, notes that the right has a fascism problem. Here are some excerpts (subscribing to it is highly recommended):

Since Donald Trump emerged on the national political scene in 2015, journalists and pundits have been debating whether it’s appropriate to compare him and the MAGA movement to the fascist movements of 20th-century Europe — and, more specifically, to the Nazism that gained traction in Germany throughout the 1920s. Some of Trump’s critics — including Biden’s campaign — argue that Trump’s incendiary rhetoric and authoritarian behavior justify the comparison. Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders — and even some of his more historically-minded critics — argue that the comparison is ahistorical; that he’s not a true fascist.

Yet the ongoing “f-word debate” seems to ignore one key dynamic: Trump and his campaign keep inviting the comparison themselves.

And:

Regardless of how or why the video made its way onto Trump’s social media feed, the incident highlights a broader problem for the GOP: Right-leaning corners of the internet are absolutely inundated with fascist or fascist-adjacent content, and that content is increasingly making its way — either intentionally or accidentally — into more mainstream conservative discourse.

After all, this isn’t the first time that the porous digital boundary between the online far-right and the MAGA movement has created real-world political problems for Trump….

…Yet in some respects, the narrow focus on Trump’s actions obscures the broader problem for the GOP, especially as campaigns lean more heavily on digital content to spread their message: The conservative internet is so thoroughly saturated with fascist and neo-Nazi content that it’s increasingly difficult for campaigns operate in right-leaning spaces online without running into it.

The problem has gotten so bad that some conservatives are starting to quietly sound the alarm. In March, the conservative activist Chris Rufo took to X to note the proliferation of “Kanye-style antisemitism, right-wing identitarianism, online grifting [and] extreme conspiratorialism” on the online right, nothing that, “The economics of online discourse are increasingly at odds with forming and mobilizing a successful political movement.”

And:

The question now is how serious of a liability it actually is. The Trump campaign’s past run-ins with the fascist right have done little to weaken his support within the GOP — and the blowback to them may have helped solidify his support by fueling the narrative that the media is trying to gin up new controversies to attack Trump. Will this latest incident be any different? If recent history is any guide, don’t count on it.

Meanwhile, on social media: