Former President Donald Trump's team went on defense after campaign advertisements ran alongside pro-Nazi content on the streaming service Rumble.
In a short video ad running at the start of some Rumble videos, Trump asks viewers to donate to his campaign, Rolling Stone reported Thursday.
“I am very humbly asking if you could chip in $5, $10, or even $25,” Trump says, vowing that such donors will aid him in his goal to “win back the White House.”
As noted by Rolling Stone, Trump ads were circulating at the beginning of a new Rumble video as of Monday by far-right conspiracy theorist Stew Peters. In that video, Peters deems Adolf Hitler “a hero” for the Nazi book burnings of the 1930s, the violent event he refers to as “awesome.”
The former president's rhetoric has been compared to Hitler's in recent months as he doubled down on his claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Polls show Trump’s supporters have been receptive to his “overtly fascist rhetoric.”
Rolling Stone requested comment from both Rumble and Peters, neither of whom responded, making it still unclear how the ad for Trump wound up on Peters’ video. A spokesperson from Trump’s team told Rolling Stone that the campaign is not “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,” blaming Rumble for placing the Trump ad alongside Peters’s video. Rolling Stone also noted that Trump’s team did not say if it was concerned about monetizing Peter’s content but more about general advertising on Rumble.
