Trump really did tweet “This is a battle to save the Heritage, History, and Greatness of our Country!”

Plugging those words into Google Translate yields “Dies ist ein Kampf um die Rettung des Erbes, der Geschichte und der Größe unseres Landes!”

I could be wrong, but I think Größe in German just means “physical size,” or “dimensions” rather than “greatness” in the sense of “having achieved many great things.”

Hitler really gave a speech on Jan 30 1939. I haven’t been able to find the full German text of that speech but presumably Trump would have been drawing on an English translation, not the original German.

At any rate, when I set Google to German and did a search for “Dies ist ein Kampf um de Rettung” I found only a handful of hits, all of them referencing this tweet from 4 days ago.

All that suggests someone recently translated Trump’s words into German and posted them above a picture of Hitler.

I set Google to search for any reference to that particular phrase from 1939 to 2019, and found exactly four hits — all from recent social media pages, including one that looks like it’s just junk designed to attract obscure web searches.

By contrast, when I grabbed some random, not even particularly powerful or evil words from a real Hitler speech, I found over 2500 places were people had coped or quoted that passage.

I’m no fan of Trump’s words, but it’s shocking to think that one of his critics can basically invent a new Hitler saying just by using Google Translate and PhotoShop.