Political experts, historians, and scholars of fascism are sounding the alarm after Donald Trump posted video Monday afternoon that promised a “unified Reich,” once again echoing language used by Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany.

“Trump’s continued use of Nazi rhetoric is un-American and despicable. Yet too many Americans are brushing off the glaring red flags about what could happen if he returns to the White House,” former Trump White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews warned. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.”

The video features made-up newspaper headlines claiming a Trump win of the 2024 presidential election. It asks, “What’s Next for America,” and promotes “the creation of a unified Reich.”

“The 30-second video, which Mr. Trump posted on his social media site, Truth Social, features several articles styled like newspapers from the early 1900s — and apparently recycling text from reports on World War I, including references to ‘German industrial strength’ and ‘peace through strength,'” The New York Times reported. “One article in the video asserts that Mr. Trump would deport 15 million migrants in a second term, while text onscreen lists the start and end days of World War I.”

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“Another headline in the video suggests that Mr. Trump in a second term would reject “globalists,” using a term that has been widely adopted on the far right and that scholars say can be used as a signal of antisemitism.”

Political commentator and former Clinton White House aide Keith Boykin posted an ABC News segment on the “unified reich” video, and remarked: “Donald Trump is openly copying Hitler’s Nazi language about a ‘unified reich’ and warning about ‘poisoning the blood’ of America, and people are still acting like this is a normal election.”

Donald Trump is openly copying Hitler’s Nazi language about a “unified reich” and warning about “poisoning the blood” of America, and people are still acting like this is a normal election.

pic.twitter.com/ET7SvCS95Z

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) May 21, 2024

In that ABC News video, reporter Rachel Scott says, “It is normal, of course for presidential candidates to share videos with their vision for the country. It is not normal for those videos to have references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler. The Trump campaign tells us this morning that this was a video that was shared by a staffer while the former president was in court saying that staffer missed the reference but as of this morning that video has not been taken down.”

The Biden-Harris campaign quickly responded to the video, posting another video of “Trump saying that only he and his top right-hand man, Dan Scavino, have access to post on his social media accounts.”

Trump’s press secretary claims Trump’s ad calling for a “UNIFIED REICH” was posted by a random unknown “staffer.”

Here is Trump saying that only he and his top right-hand man, Dan Scavino, have access to post on his social media accounts pic.twitter.com/AtU6UnzFBm

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 21, 2024

The “unified Reich” video remained on Trump’s Truth Social platform for well over 12 hours, and reportedly was still up as of at least 8:00 AM, although it has since been taken down.

“Earlier this month,” The Associated Press reported, “Trump said at a fundraiser that Biden is running a ‘Gestapo administration,’ referring to the secret Nazi police force.”

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“Trump previously used rhetoric echoing Adolf Hitler when he said immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ and called his opponents ‘vermin.’ The former president has also drawn wide backlash for having dined with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist in 2022 and for downplaying the 2017 rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists chanted ‘Jews will not replace us!'”

The Biden-Harris campaign also released this statement:

“America, stop scrolling and pay attention. 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.’ 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.”

Overnight, responding to the “unified Reich” video popular historian Heather Cox Richardson warned: “It is not clear to me how anyone can any longer deny that Trump is promising to destroy our democracy and usher in authoritarianism. But it is also not clear that he is still a figure that any but the extremes of his base will follow to that end. Hence his emphasis on turning them to violence.”

Journalist Gil Duran, who covers “tech fascism,” and “billionaire extremism,” says Trump’s “unified Reich” video was not an accident.

Trump’s use of Nazi “reich” terminology to frame his campaign isn’t an accident — it’s a Trial Balloon.
As usual, he’s floating offensive and outrageous idea to push extreme ideas and test public reaction.
More at FrameLab with @GeorgeLakoff : 🎈https://t.co/ZasdRYuORu pic.twitter.com/dSdHMsYS6I

— gil duran (@gilduran76) May 21, 2024

Former FBI Assistant Director Frank Figliuzzi, now an NBC News National Security Analyst, also noted that the “reference to Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany is not an accident.”

Former CIA analyst Gail Helt, responding to the Trump campaign’s claim it was posted by a staffer who didn’t see the “unified Reich” text, wrote: “Of course they knew. Of course they saw it. I hate Nazis.”

“Historian here,” wrote Professor of American history Dr. Manisha Sinha, snarkily responding to the Trump video. “Trump calls for a unified Reich but hey we are all being paranoid by calling him a wannabe fascist supported by neo Nazis and neo Confederates.”

Professor of history and expert on fascism and the Holocaust, the extreme right, and neo-Nazis, Dr. Federico Finchelstein, responding to a report on the “unified Reich” video, called it, “Wannabe fascism in motion…”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan, after becoming visibly angered by Trump defense witness Robert Costello, cleared the courtroom of the jury and the press before admonishing the “MAGA-friendly lawyer” Monday afternoon in the ex-president’s criminal “hush money” trial.

Calling it a “brawl,” The Daily Beast set the scene: “After Costello, a former prosecutor, was reprimanded for delivering outbursts in the court whenever he was interrupted or told not to answer a question that had been objected to and sustained, Costello began to stare down the judge.”

Before the reprimand, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported: “Twice now the judge has sustained an objection and Costello answered regardless. Judge Merchan addresses him directly to not answer if he’s sustained the objection. ‘Jesus,’ Costello mutters after it happens again. ‘I’m sorry,’ the judge, visibly annoyed, says to him. ‘I’m sorry?'”

And then, the admonition.

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“I’d like to discuss proper decorum in the courtroom,” Judge Merchan said, according to Collins. “If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t give me side eye and you don’t roll your eyes.”

Collins added: “Then in a raised voice, Merchan asks, ‘Are you staring me down right now?!'”

“The jury was NOT in the room for this,” Collins added. “Merchan sent them out, then admonished Costello, then when he was staring him down, Merchan became furious and cleared the courtroom. So the jury witnesses none of this. (And the press missed whatever was said in the interim.)”

Here’s how it went down, according to MSNBC host and legal contributor Katie Phang.

“Judge Merchan is ANGRY,” she observed, before reporting the dialogue:

“MERCHAN: ‘I’d like to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom’
MERCHAN: ‘If you don’t like my ruling, you don’t say ‘Jeez’ ‘
MERCHAN: You don’t say ‘strike it’ because I’m the only one who can strike it.
MERCHAN: ‘You don’t give me side eye and you don’t roll your eyes’
COSTELLO: I understand.”

Phang added, “When the media were allowed back in, Costello is seated at the witness stand looking decidedly chastened. Merchan looks calm.”

The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports the judge didn’t calmly just clear the courtroom:

!!!!! Judge MERCHAN to Costello: “Are you staring me down right now? Clear the courtroom!” https://t.co/2k6g6qK8df

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) May 20, 2024

MSNBC legal contributor Lisa Rubin called it, “one of the wildest things I’ve ever seen in court.”

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And while CNN’s Collins noted the jury was not in the courtroom for exchange, Phang reports: “Although the dressing down of Costello took place outside of earshot of the jury, they witnessed firsthand Costello’s demeanor and petulance and heard firsthand his quips and remarks from the witness stand. Perhaps Costello just reinforced to the jury why Cohen didn’t want to keep Costello as his lawyer…Costello is pandering for an audience of one: Trump.”

MSNBC legal analyst Kristy Greenberg noted, “Michael Cohen was respectful. Bob Costello is acting like a clown. Jurors will notice and this will hurt Trump. Any concerns that jurors may have had about Cohen have now been overshadowed by Costello’s disrespect to the judge right in front of their faces.”

Lowell also reported that after the reprimand, “Costello is so red in the face he resembles a strawberry.”

See the social media post above or at this link.

U.S. Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have no choice but to observe federal law and recuse themselves from cases involving the 2020 presidential election, according to an attorney who served as a federal prosecutor for 30 years, while a noted constitutional law expert is warning Justice Alito “may be responsible for delaying” the Court’s decision on Donald Trump’s claims of absolute immunity.

Their remarks come as Americans are waiting for the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its decision on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute and total immunity from prosecution.

“The Supreme Court, as led by insurrection advocates Alito & Thomas, has caught & killed Trump’s prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election. The impartiality of Thomas & Alito ‘might reasonably be questioned’ so the federal law REQUIRES their recusal. Period. Full stop,” wrote Glenn Kirschner, now an NBC News/MSNBC legal analyst.

Kirschner posted text from federal law, 28 U.S.C. Sec. 455, which reads: “Any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

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The renewed interest in both far-right justices comes after Friday’s New York Times bombshell report that revealed a symbol of January 6 insurrectionists, the “Stop the Steal” flag, which is the U.S. Stars and Stripes flying upside down, was flown at Justice Alito’s home just days before President Joe Biden was inaugurated.

Justice Alito claimed his wife was responsible for flying the American flag in that manner, which is also used to indicate a situation of dire or extreme distress. He claimed she had done so after an altercation with a neighbor, who had a “F*** Trump” sign on their lawn that could be seen by children awaiting the school bus. But those claims seemed to fall apart after sleuths noted because of COVID schools were operating virtually, so there were no school buses running, and neighbors did not remember what allegedly was extreme neighborhood drama.

On Friday, Laurence Tribe, University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University, a constitutional law scholar and professor who has argued three dozen times before the Supreme Court, told CNN (video below) he believes Justice Alito must recuse.

“I do. I don’t think there’s any question about it. It’s in many ways, more serious than what we’ve seen with Justice Thomas. At least Justice Thomas could say that, ‘my wife Ginny has her own separate career. We don’t talk about the cases.’ You may believe that or you may not, but that’s very different from what’s going on with Justice Alito. He’s not saying, ‘My wife has her own separate career.’ He’s throwing her under the bus and blaming her for what is on his house, his flagpole. It’s his flag malfunction. It’s his upside down flag and everyone knows that the upside down the flag, which the United States Code says should be flown that way only in cases of absolute emergency as a kind of SOS, was in this case, a symbol of the claim that the election was stolen from Donald Trump.”

“It was the banner of the insurrectionists,” Tribe continued. “And I’m reminded of something that the late Justice Scalia said in the opinion he wrote in 1987, he said, ‘you cannot expect to ride with the cops if you cheer for the robbers.’ In this case, Justice Alito expects to preside over a decision about whether there was an insurrection and who was responsible for it. And whether Donald Trump who has been charged with involvement in trying to obstruct the operations of government and the transfer of power is immune, or if cases before the court, he’s obviously not qualified to sit in this case.”

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Like Kirschner, Tribe pointed to 28 U.S.C. Sec. 455, saying, “28 US Code section 455 says that any federal judge or justice must – not may, but must – recuse him or herself in any case where either that justice or the justice’s spouse has any skin in the game. There’s no distance here between Mr. Alito and Mrs. Alito. It’s clear that whatever offensive sign was involved, that dispute between neighbors trivializes what’s involved here.”

On the Supreme Court’s pending decision on Trump’s immunity claims, Tribe added, Justice Alito “may be responsible for delaying it.”

“After all, the protocol within the court is the different justices dissenting and Alito is probably writing a dissent from a rejection of the extreme claim of absolute immunity. That didn’t seem to gain traction with the court. If a justice is dissenting, you wait till the dissent is done before announcing the case. So by delaying this immunity decision so long that a trial can’t occur before the election, the effect may be to give de facto immunity to the former president, who if he wins the election will pick an attorney general who will dismiss the case. So ultimate accountability is very much on the line.”

As for Justice Thomas, back in March of 2022, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer wrote: “Legal Scholars Are Shocked By Ginni Thomas’s ‘Stop the Steal’ Texts,” which also read: “Several experts say that Thomas’s husband, the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, must recuse himself from any case related to the 2020 election.”

And in June of 2022, former Bush 43 chief White House ethics lawyer Richard Painter, also posting that federal law, wrote: “Justice Thomas’s participation in Dobbs means Ginni Thomas was not receiving payment from persons seeking reverse of Roe. Right?”

He was referring to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, coincidentally written by Justice Alito, which overturned five decades of civil rights law and removed abortion as a constitutionally-protected right.

“We have no idea who’s paying Ginni Thomas,” he continued, referring to Clarence Thomas’s spouse, who also alleged worked to overturn the 2020 election. “Justice Thomas refuses to recuse from any cases because of her. This conflict of interest is unworkable.”

Watch Professor Tribe below or at this link.

5.17.24 715 pm ET CNN Anchor @ErinBurnett w/

Constitutional Scholar and Harvard Law Professor, Laurence Tribe @tribelaw

Burnett: “Should Justice Alito recuse himself from anything Trump or the Election”

Tribe: I do, I don’t think there’s any question about it pic.twitter.com/PmdEpjRv6I

— Jeff Storobinsky (@jeffstorobinsky) May 17, 2024

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