Biden jumps on Trump ‘unified Reich’ video that plays into a key theme of president’s reelection push
By Kyle Feldscher and Kevin Liptak, CNN
Boston (CNN) — President Joe Biden and his campaign are looking to capitalize on former President Donald Trump’s posting of a video showing images of a fake newspaper article that references a “unified Reich” if he’s reelected in 2024.
The video underscores Biden’s central argument from his 2020 run and plays directly into what has shaped his reelection effort this year: the country cannot afford to give Trump another four years in office. The president has repeatedly said he decided to reenter political life and run for the White House in 2020 after Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” at a deadly White nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
The video has been removed from Trump’s Truth Social account, but the Biden campaign has quickly incorporated the former president’s use of verbiage associated with Nazi Germany into messaging. Biden made Trump’s comments the focus of two closed-door campaign fundraisers Tuesday night, a video on his social media platforms and a fundraising email.
“That’s not the language of any Americans. It’s the language of Hitler’s Germany,” Biden told donors in Boston during a campaign reception.
He added, “The threat that Trump poses is greater in the second term than it was in the first.”
The term “reich” is often associated with Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, who designated Germany a “Third Reich” from 1933 to 1945. The video details “what happens after Donald Trump wins” with a narrator reading hypothetical headlines like “Economy Booms!” and “Border is closed,” styled as World War I-era newspaper clippings. Under one headline that reads “What’s next for America?” is a reference to the “creation of a unified Reich.”
Another headline in the video states “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” next to the start and end days of World War I.
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement that the video was not created by the campaign and was “reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court.”
Biden has previously compared Trump’s messaging to that used by Hitler’s Nazi regime. In November, after Trump compared his political rivals to “vermin” and said undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Biden said it was the type of language often used in 1930s Germany. A campaign fundraising email sent Tuesday also highlighted Trump’s previous remark that he would not be a dictator in a potential second term “except for day one.”
Biden has had trouble getting voters to view his policy record as successful so far during the 2024 campaign, with polls showing his approval rating underwater and his marks on the economy and inflation remaining starkly negative. His campaign has increasingly embraced taking on the former president, aiming to amplify what they see as the threat Trump poses if he takes office again.
Throughout Trump’s criminal hush money trial in New York, the campaign has needled the former president without directly getting Biden involved in commenting on the case. However, Biden has used subtle jabs in social media videos to indirectly poke fun at his opponent, and his campaign returned to that strategy in an attempt to highlight the “unified Reich” moment, showing what appeared to be Biden’s first reaction to hearing about the post.
“Is this on his official account?” Biden asks in the video. “Wow.”
He added: “That’s Hitler’s language. That’s not America’s. He cares about holding onto power. I care about you.”
When talking to donors, Biden said that Trump’s language is beneath the office he once held and is looking to regain and that it was not the “language of American presidents.”
“He’s only obsessed with one thing, about losing in 2020. It unhinged him. I meant it. The guy’s a little unhinged,” Biden said.
The-CNN-Wire
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