Trump's NOT Fourth Reich

More idiocy in a day ending in a “y.”

The new scandal slithering down the Interwebs is the claim that the Trump campaign is calling for a “unified Reich” as a dog-whistle to their Nazi fanbase. No, sorry, much as you hate Trump, it’s not true.

The madness started when Trump posted a 30-second video to his Truth Social website. The video showed headlines announcing a future Trump victory plastered across the pages of old-timey-looking newspapers. At the 5-second mark, this image is on the screen.

Look closely. On the left side you can see in blurry letters “CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH.” (The video is no longer on Truth Social, but there are copies everywhere if you want to watch the whole thing.)

This blurry filler text sets the election campaign's ball of crazy rolling down a Nazi-themed bowling alley.

The thrilled Biden team immediately screams that Trump plans to “create a UNIFIED REICH,” just like Nazi Germany.

Biden himself, in Scranton Joe mode, is filmed in a short mini-ad saying, “Is this on his official account? Wow. A unified Reich? That’s Hitler’s language! That’s not America’s!”

Media outlets jump on the story with headlines confirming Trump’s Reich reference (but with little context, of course).

After the heat, the Trump campaign took down the video, blaming a staffer’s mistake for everything.

"This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a junior staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court," said Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt in a written statement.

Nobody on the left was buying it. Trump is a Nazi! As if we didn’t already know it!

Ok, now cool your chickens, Leeroy.¹ Alarm bells should already be sounding in your noggin because Trump being a Nazi is such a perfect story for salivating Trump haters that you really ought to double and triple-check it. “Too good to be true” is a cliché for a reason!

For those preferring facts to a frothing feeding frenzy, David Graham lays out all the details in The Atlantic.

Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

Read Graham again. The anonymous video creator did not deliberately insert supposedly Nazi elements in the video. It came from an already-existing template of stock footage of “Newspaper Vintage History Headlines.”

The text in the template had been grabbed from the Wikipedia page on World War I. The wording has since changed (of course), but the Wayback Machine has a copy of the original “unified Reich” language.

The “unified Reich” referred to in that Wikipedia entry has nothing to do with the Nazis. Before 1871, Germany was divided into over a dozen independent states. After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Germany became a unified country under Kaiser William I. “Reich” means “realm,” and so the new state referred to itself as a Deutsches Reich (German Realm). Hence the phrase “unified Reich.” It’s referring to a Germany that existed before Hitler was even born. It’s true that the Nazis later used the term (“the Third Reich”) but so did the democratic Weimar Republic (1919-1933).

Again, the Trump team did not choose the filler text; it was in the template from the start.

Still not convinced?

Don’t forget that Graham discovered that Candi Staton, an African American gospel singer, had used the same template in her video for “1963.”

Here’s a closeup of those same words (“CREATION OF A UNIFIED REICH”) in her video. Is anyone insane enough to argue that Ms. Staton is secretly a Nazi?

What clearly happened is some Trump fan used a quick-and-dirty template to create the video and nobody on Trump’s team noticed that some language in the background had that hot-button “Reich” word in it. Should they have taken more care? Obviously! Of course, so should Candi Staton’s video team!

Trump, however, unlike Ms. Staton, doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.

Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap.

I think it requires more of a leap than does Graham, but he’s not wrong to remind us that Trump has said an awful lot of awful things.

But still, c’mon man! Do you really think that there is a large base of Third Reich lovers out there, and Trump’s campaign was deliberately signaling to them that he was on board with their goose-stepping dreams? And the method they used was some blurry text on the left side of a briefly shown image?

And the answer from many liberals is, “Yes, we do. He’s a Nazi, and he’s trying to create an American Reich.” It’s these folks who will continue to believe—despite any debunkings—that Trump and his team were deliberately using Nazi words (even though the words in question weren’t even about the Nazis and weren’t written by anyone in the Trump campaign!).

I doubt it; I really do. Trump is not a fascist in any historical way. He doesn’t have a secret Hitler shrine. He’s a narcissist who loves the adulation of the crowd and hates losing. He desperately wants to be back in the White House where he can be a winner and bask in the cheers (that will never fill the void in what passes for his soul). He may also hope that winning will protect him from his legal difficulties and help advance his business interests.

Despite his lack of Hitlerian bona fides, Trump is still awful for democracy. His contempt for democratic norms, his months-long refusal to accept defeat in 2020, and his attempts to circumvent the results have tarnished our great country. I’m sure he’ll do more harm to our democracy if he’s victorious this November.² And it’s not inconceivable that he’d try and finagle a third term if it seemed at all possible.

There’s also the actual policy content of the video! The narrator says that Trump will deport 15 million people! It also calls for “no more wars,” suggesting that Ukraine will be abandoned to Russia. And if you want an actual deliberate antisemitic dog whistle, there’s a headline inserted saying, “PRESIDENT TRUMP REJECTS GLOBALIST WARMONGERS.” “Globalist,” like “cosmopolitan,” has often been used as a euphemism for “Jews” (although, in their defense, many Klaus Schwab-fearing anti-globalists are genuinely unaware of this history³).

None of this, however dreadful it is, makes Trump himself a Nazi fanboy. Democrats need to stick to the stuff he actually does and says; there’s more than enough ammunition there. I’m also never in favor of building campaign talking points on lies. They may be tasty kibble for hardcore Trump haters, but they aren’t going to convince less partisan undecided voters who have steadily refused to buy into the “democracy is in danger” argument.

This whole story rests on nonsense. Even if you believe the video contained deliberate Nazi dog whistles (a crazy-making view that ups my perpetual political migraine to an 11), in no way did he literally “call for a unified Reich.” If we want to be against “disinformation” and “misinformation,” we need to stop spreading it. The excuse that disseminating lies may win Democrats an election isn’t good enough and probably isn’t accurate. All it will do is add one more annoying set of talking points for Democratic hacks that will convince nobody but the Democratic base. I’m not looking forward to six months of my friends saying, “But we know Trump said he wanted an American Reich!”

Oy vey.

1. If you get that reference, I’m very proud of you.

2. Yes, I’m biased too. I can’t stand the man!

3. Schwab is the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, an NGO that is the boogeyman in many current conspiracy theories. That Schwab looks like a classic Bond villain helps feed these theories!