Awful New Info About Trump and “Reich” Video Shows Deep MAGA Sickness
A helpful framework for understanding all this is Damon Linker’s conception of the “fasc-ish” political style. Under Trump, this has included overt support for political violence, totalitarian-style serial deception expressly understood as an assertion of the power to remake reality, depictions of a nation in total moral and spiritual collapse, and the blaming of this supposed calamity on mass betrayal by traitorous elites.
This “fasc-ish” politics also casts Trump as a martyred victim of those elites, and elevates his sacred bond with his supporters—“the people,” accurately understood—as the only hope for national redemption. It savagely dehumanizes political opponents, invents a supremely powerful leftist threat that justifies anything in response, shows limitless contempt for the very idea that rules should constrain and direct political engagement, and elevates deliberate agitprop as an idealized form of political expression. As those aforementioned Trump quotes and proposals show, he and his propagandists are trafficking in all these elements.
The video promoted by Trump’s feed contained the words “unifying Reich,” which were a tad too explicitly evocative of Nazism, requiring his disavowal. But the bigger story is unmistakable: Trump and his allies are testing how far they can push forward with a dizzying barrage of propaganda tropes and policy threats that are at least as perniciously “fasc-ish” as that video, and often far more so. And if Trump can get elected in spite of all that, they will likely claim a mandate for full-blown authoritarian rule.
