After Donald Trump shared a video on Truth Social announcing the advent of a “united Reich” if he wins the White House, his campaign spokesperson insisted that the video was created by a ” random account” and posted by an anonymous staff member. The tweet now appears to have been deleted, presumably by someone not named “Donald Trump.”
The Trump campaign’s initial story about this video may or may not be true. But while we discuss these details, let’s not lose sight of a larger point. Trump and his high-profile allies have clearly embarked on a larger project, aimed at accustoming American voters to fascist language and sweeping authoritarian political “solutions.” They slowly push the speech deeper into this charged territory, as if thoroughly testing how far they can go with this without causing the audience too much discomfort.
The video envisions a future America led by a victorious Trump and appears to feature a title taken from text copied from a Wikipedia entry on World War I, which describes “German industrial power” after 1871 and is credited with “creating of a united Reich”: that is to say a united Germany. The video makes no reference to the Third Reich (the German Empire, from 1871 to 1918, was the Second Reich). At the same time, newspaper headlines such as “Borders Closed” and “15 Million Illegal Aliens Deported” anchor visions of nationalist power and a revival of mass expulsions intended to cleanse the nation.
But whatever the precise purpose of the video, the new information that emerges helps shed light on a larger point: Trump, his supporters, and large parts of his movement are crossing the outer limits of mainstream political discourse into a openly fascist or authoritarian. direction.
The video appears to be the work of a meme creator known as “Ramble_Rants,” the Associated Press reported. This creator belongs to a group of meme creators who collaborated with the Trump campaign. As The New York Times has detailed, their work includes conspiracy theories about election fraud, extreme denigration of President Biden, and brutally offensive — including outright racist — depictions of Trump’s other political and legal opponents. Trump and other MAGA figures welcomed much of this, the Times reported, and sought to directly influence these efforts.
The creator of the “Reich” video committed even more dangerous acts along these lines, the Times showed. So when Trump’s social media page shares a video like this praising the coming “United Reich” built on dramatic acts of large-scale national cleansing, it opens a window onto a larger phenomenon: this gray area where Trump and his leaders exist. . Agents encourage the widespread dissemination of fascist nonsense and propaganda and seek to exploit the energies they unleash.
It’s a key sign that Republicans upset by this kind of politics immediately understood the broader significance of this video’s genesis. As Republican strategists Brian Riedel and Alyssa Farrah Griffin point out, the creation of the video itself — and even blaming a Trump staffer for sharing it — only demonstrates the existence of a large number of young employees who are fluent in fascist political language online, which Trump is. speaks it fluently. His activists consider him essential to their movement.
Meanwhile, Trump and his main propagandists are aggressively seeding rhetoric with their fascist language. In recent months, Trump has described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” invented a new category called “immigrant crime,” threatened to root out government “vermin” that opposes him, and introduced parts of the Constitution to repeal them. . He pledged to be a “dictator,” if only “from day one.”
On another front, Trump and MAGA Republicans have concocted a new conspiracy theory: that the FBI agents who searched Mar-a-Lago were supposedly authorized to kill Trump. As Andrew Egger explains in The Bulwark, this is based on a ridiculous and misreading of FBI regulations, but the goal is certainly not to convince anyone that the FBI actually intends to assassinate them. Rather, it is a matter of determining the extent to which MAGA will fabricate pretenses to eliminate incoming “vermin.”
Then there are promises from Trump and his allies to unleash the Justice Department on political enemies, fill the bureaucracy with corrupt loyalists, turn intelligence agencies into MAGA enforcement squads, and launch deeply sadistic mass expulsions of millions of immigrants (said Stephen Miller) which are “staggering”, which seems to measure the extent of the public’s enthusiasm for its cruelty), to disrupt international institutions, to empower international tyrants and despots, and much more.
As The New Republic’s excellent new series on “American Fascism” explains, you can see in these proposals a grand blueprint for authoritarian rule – and for a new kind of political brutality directed against various enemies at home. interior of the country. Understood this way, the apparent display of such hideous policy “solutions” by Trump and MAGA thinkers seems designed to gauge the public’s tolerance for authoritarianism.
Damon Linker’s conception of the “fascist” political style provides a useful framework for understanding all of this. Under Trump, this has translated into overt support for political violence, a serial deception of the totalitarian type explicitly understood as the assertion of the power to reshape reality, the depiction of a nation in complete moral and spiritual collapse and the attribution of this alleged catastrophe to massive betrayal. By traitorous elites
This “fascist” policy also presents Trump as a martyr to these elites and exalts his sacred bond with his supporters – “the people,” strictly speaking – as the only hope for national salvation. He brutally dehumanizes political opponents, invents a left-wing threat so powerful that it justifies any response, demonstrates boundless contempt for the idea that rules should constrain and guide political participation, and elevates the deliberate incitement to the rank of ideal form of political expression. As Trump’s quotes and suggestions above show, he and his supporters discuss all of these elements.
The video promoted by Trump contained the phrase “unify the Reich,” which so clearly evoked Nazism that it should be disavowed. But the bigger story is unambiguous: Trump and his allies are testing their ability to move forward with a dizzying barrage of propaganda tropes and political threats that are at least as virulent as the “fascism” in this video , and often much more. If Trump manages to win the election despite all this, he will likely demand a mandate for total authoritarian rule.
