US election 2024
“Hitler’s language”: Biden accuses Trump of using Nazi vocabulary
The threat posed by Trump’s second term in office is greater than during his first presidency, says Biden. photo
© Alex Brandon/AP/dpa
The term Reich is associated with the Nazis’ “Third Reich”. A video of this is now being shared on Trump’s Internet platform. Biden’s criticism is not long in coming.
US President Joe Biden has his predecessor and election campaign rival Donald Trump again accused of Nazi rhetoric after the distribution of a questionable video clip. Trump uses “Hitler’s language,” not America’s, Biden said in a campaign video. In the short clip, the Democrat holds a phone and says, referring to the video, “That’s on his official account? Wow.”
Biden also attacked the Republican, who wants to move back into the White House in November, at a campaign event in Boston. The threat posed by Trump’s second term in office is greater than during his first presidency, said the 81-year-old, according to the press traveling with him. He called Trump “disturbed” and accused him of being vindictive after losing the 2020 presidential election.
Trump had shared a video – later deleted – on the platform Truth Social, which he co-founded, in which fictitious newspaper articles were shown about the possible scenario that the Republican presidential candidate could win again in the election in November. One of the headlines spoke, among other things, of the creation of a “united empire”.
Speaker: Video not part of the election campaign
Trump’s entourage later confirmed that the clip had been removed from his account. When asked, a spokeswoman for his campaign team said it was not a video of the election campaign. It came from some account and was spread on Trump’s account by an employee “who obviously didn’t see the word.”
The term is often associated with the Nazi “Third Reich” in Germany. According to US media, the word Reich in the video probably refers to the founding of the German Empire in 1871. Accordingly, the text comes from a Wikipedia entry on the First World War. The video was created using a ready-made newspaper article mask. It has also been used in other clips online. Other newspaper headlines in the video distributed on Trump’s platform also make reference to the First World War.
Trump regularly uses radical rhetoric
Trump wants to run against Biden again in the presidential election in November. During the election campaign, he regularly uses radical rhetoric, uses hateful and dehumanizing language, makes racist statements and incites against minorities. In the past, he has denigrated political opponents as “vermin.”
In other campaign appearances, Trump said, for example, that some migrants are not “people” at all – or that migrants “poison the blood of our country.” The 77-year-old compared Biden’s government to the Gestapo. The Secret State Police (Gestapo) was the political police of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945.