Donald Trump has deleted a video posted to his Truth Social account that included a reference to the “creation of a unified Reich” if he returns to the White House in November.
The 30-second clip, which was posted on Monday evening and quickly stoked outrage, showed several hypothetical news headlines in the instance that Mr Trump wins the 2024 presidential election.
“It a landslide!,” bursts onto the screen in the fabricated newspaper clipping. “Trump wins!!”.
The next headline questions “what’s next for America?,” along with a photograph of the former president staunchly holding up a fist to a backdrop of the American flag.
But on closer inspection, the faux article becomes problematic.
“Industrial strength significantly increased driven by the creation of a unified Reich,” it reads.
“Reich” derives from the Germanic world “realm”, referring to an empire. It also carries the connotation of Germany’s former dictator Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, another name for his Nazi regime.
“This was not a campaign video, it 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,” Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told the Associated Press.
The video remained on Mr Trump’s Truth Social until Tuesday morning.
President Biden’s campaign team appeared to contest the notion that the post was an innocent mistake, claiming that it was a premonition of Mr Trump “ruling as a dictator”.
“Donald Trump is not playing games; he is telling America exactly what he intends to do if he regains power: rule as a dictator over a ‘unified Reich’,” James Singer, a spokesperson for Mr Biden, wrote in a statement on Tuesday morning.
“Parroting ‘Mein Kampf’ while you warn of a bloodbath if you lose is the type of unhinged behavior you get from a guy who knows that democracy continues to reject his extreme vision of chaos, division, and violence,” he added.
Earlier this month, Mr Trump said at a fundraiser that Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” referring to the secret Nazi police force.
Mr Trump previously said immigrants entering the US illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” and called his opponents “vermin,” wording similar to Mein Kampf, but the former president later said he was unaware Hitler had used similar language and denied the comments were racist.
At least one of the headlines flashing in the video appears to be text that is copied verbatim from a Wikipedia entry on the First World War: “German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich.”
In one image, the headlines “Border Is Closed” and “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” appear above smaller text with the start and end dates of the First World War.
Associated Press contributed to this report