Donald Trump Campaign Video Controversy Traced to Turkish Designer’s Template

On Monday, a video posted on Donald Trump’s Truth Social account featured a hypothetical headline from a second presidential term, stating “industrial strength significantly increased… driven by the creation of a unified Reich.” The term “Reich” is heavily associated with Nazi Germany, raising alarm among critics, including Joe Biden, for its controversial implications.

According to a CNN report, the video used a template created by Enes Şimşek, a graphic designer from Istanbul, available on the stock footage site Video Hive. The text, taken verbatim from a Wikipedia article on World War I, was intended as placeholder text. The Trump campaign stated that the post was not an official campaign video but was reposted by a staffer who did not recognize the contentious wording.

Şimşek explained that he had sold 16 copies of the template at $21 each and did not anticipate his work being used in such a context. Following the controversy, he was instructed to remove the term “unified Reich” from his template.

The Biden campaign pointed to this incident as part of a pattern of troubling rhetoric from Trump, who has previously faced accusations of echoing Nazi and white supremacist language.