Ben Shapiro plays down Trump's 'unified Reich' post, says Dems 'more associated with open antisemitism'

WASHINGTON, DC: Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro brushed off criticisms against former President Donald Trump for sharing a campaign video mentioning 'unified Reich' on social media, during the Wednesday, May 22 episode of his podcast.

Instead, Shapiro went on to make his case about how incumbent Joe Biden and the Democratic party formed the real threat to Jews in the modern day, for "giving aid and comfort to today’s Nazis – the Iranian regime and their terror proxies like Hamas."

Donald Trump's 'unified Reich' reference

Trump shared a video on his social media Truth Social on Monday, May 20, which included a reference to a “unified Reich” among hypothetical news headlines if he wins the upcoming election, reported AP News.

While the major headlines on the screen at the time read “Trump wins!!” and “Economy booms!” others appeared to reference World War I.

While the term 'Reich' is often associated with Nazi Germany's Third Reich, its usage in the video seemed to be along the lines of the 1871 call for the formation of the modern pan-German nation, unifying smaller states into a single Reich, or empire.

The 30-second video was removed from the account by the next morning, but it still caught the media's attention, earning the presumptive GOP nominee scathing criticism from both the press as well as the rival Biden campaign.

A statement by Karoline Leavitt, press secretary of the Trump campaign, read, "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."

Ben Shapiro's take on the fiasco

Shapiro called the controversial headline "very difficult to see" and "almost indecipherable" in the video temporarily uploaded by Trump on Truth Social.

"It was just a video which showed how Donald Trump is successful, and presumably, they took stock newspaper files and they pasted in new headlines," he tried to explain.

"Let's be clear about what's actually happening here," he stated.

"What's actually happening here is that Joe Biden's party is split between people who are actually are pretty okay with today's Nazis, meaning Hamas, or the Iranian regime, and people who are not okay with all of that. That is a battle that is being waged inside the Democratic Party. There is no question at this juncture in time that the party that is more closely associated with open antisemitism in the United States is the Democratic Party."

Shapiro also pointed out later, "Donald Trump does unthinking things on a regular basis," but asked anyone who "really believed" him to be antisemitic to come forward with "one iota of evidence."

"This is all designed to rely on the Joe Biden 2020 argument that Donald Trump was a threat to the republic so deep and abiding that it didn't matter that Joe Biden could no longer speak English, Donald Trump was the person you had to fear."