Trump Campaign Ads Are Helping Fund Pro-Nazi Content Creators
Some of Donald Trump’s campaign ads are running alongside pro-Nazi videos, meaning the former president’s campaign is helping to monetize such horrific content. And his campaign seems totally fine with it.
Trump’s ads are running at the start of certain videos posted on Rumble, a streaming platform popular with the far right, Rolling Stone reported Thursday. In the ads, Trump asks viewers to donate to his campaign.
As of Monday, the ads were playing alongside a video made by far-right commentator Stew Peters. In the video, which was posted last week, Peters calls Adolf Hitler a “hero” for the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, a phenomenon Peters describes as “awesome.” Peters also calls for current-day book burnings and accuses Jewish people of trying to “make us surrender” to accepting LGBTQ people and sexual “degeneracy.”
Neither Rumble nor Peters responded to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, so it’s not clear how the Trump ad ended up on Peters’s video, nor how much money Peters is making off that particular post or on Rumble in general.
Trump’s campaign, however, blamed Rumble for placing the ad alongside Peters’s video. “We aren’t picking any particular video or channel to run ads on, and we are not given visibility into every single ad that is served during every video,” a spokesperson told Rolling Stone. The campaign did not say whether it had any concerns about monetizing Peters’s content or about advertising on Rumble more generally.
But it’s not surprising that Trump advertising has landed on a pro-Nazi video. Trump openly embraced authoritarianism while he was in the White House. He regularly praised various dictators and allegedly had a list of things he liked about Hitler.
And it’s somehow gotten worse during his current campaign. He has repeatedly paraphrased Hitler’s rhetoric in campaign speeches, and on Friday, he hosted Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. Although he has joked about only acting like a dictator on “day one” of a potential second term, Trump and his allies are already bragging about their plans should they retake the White House.
Ironically, though, Peters is not a fan of Trump, apparently because the former president isn’t Nazi-esque enough. Peters, a Holocaust denier, has pushed anti–Covid vaccine conspiracies and called for Anthony Fauci and Hunter Biden to be hanged.
Peters has promoted antisemitism, masked as aggressive anti-Zionism, in response to the war in Gaza. And he has hosted fellow Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and the leader of the neo-Nazi group Goyim Defense League on his show.
Trump, on the other hand, “bows to his Zionist masters,” according to Peters. He has also accused the former president of prioritizing Israel over the United States.