The controversial "unified Reich" ad for former President Donald Trump's 2024 — created by campaign aide Natalie Harp — actually has origins in Turkey, according to a new report.
CNN reported recently that the ad used a template that was created by Turkish graphic designer Enes Şimşek, more than a year ago. It was made available on stock footage and video effects resource hub VideoHive, and Şimşek reportedly used language he copied from Wikipedia's article about World War I as placeholder text. That controversial placeholder text read: "German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified reich."
"When I was doing this job, I never even thought that one day such an event would happen," Şimşek wrote in a post to his website. "I guess [the Trump campaign] forgot to change some of the text when they edited the project. And things grew very mad."
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In an interview with CNN, Şimşek confirmed that he created the template, which he said he only sold 16 copies of for $21 USD apiece. Two other examples of the template's use were reportedly a French language video posted to Facebook, and a music video posted to YouTube.
"I didn’t know it is my power to change politics … I don’t know what could be crazier than that,” Şimşek told the network. “Imagine if your work shakes a country.”
Şimşek's explanation seems to back up the Trump campaign's version of events, in which it stated that Harp simply overlooked the "unified Reich" phrase when posting the video to Trump's Truth Social platform (it was up for roughly 12 hours before eventually being taken down). However, other text in the video is in line with Trump's public policy plans.
The New York Times noted that "one article in the video asserts that Mr. Trump would deport 15 million migrants in a second term," which tracks with previous reporting about his plans to launch a massive immigrant detention and deportation program if he won the November election. And the "unified Reich" oversight is not the first time the Trump campaign has deployed language reminiscent of Adolf Hitler's regime.
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Trump has notably not distanced himself from past remarks on the campaign trail in which he referred to his political opponents as "vermin" and said immigrants — particularly those "from Africa, from Asia, all over the world" — were "poisoning the blood of our country." As NBC News reported, the latter remark is taken almost verbatim from Hitler's "Mein Kampf," in which he wrote that "all great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning."
After the release of the "unified Reich" video, Biden campaign spokesperson James Singer said the video was Trump showing Americans "exactly what he intends to do if he regains power," which is to "rule as a dictator over a 'unified reich.'"
"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," Singer said.
Click here to read CNN's full report.
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