Donald Trump's 'Unified Reich'

Bullhorns, Not Dog Whistles

Last night, Donald Trump posted a 30 second preview of what life in America will be like if he’s reelected in November. Closed borders and mass deportations are commonplace promises for the MAGA leader now. “The Creation of a Unified Reich” was something new, different, and darker than anything we’ve seen to date.

That’s saying something considering Trump’s Hitlerian comments about vermin, immigrants’ poisoning American blood, his rants about retribution against enemies, becoming a dictator or perhaps seeking a third term.

To understand what’s at work in this video, and its aftermath, we need to breakdown this situations’s ideological, logistical, and political nature.

Ideology Trumps All

To most of us, Donald Trump doesn’t espouse a particular ideology. To his followers, though, he proclaims a vision of America that is based on control: Control by white Christian men of everyone else. We often complicate things. This, like all fights, is about power. The power of one, small group of people, to tell a much larger group of people how they must live their lives.

The use of the word “reich” in this video is no accident. Depending on your perspective, its inclusion is either an Easter Egg to neo-Nazis or the starting gun for Trump’s most fervent and fanatical followers. We’re four years from Trump’s “stand back and stand by” and many of those same people who believe he won in 2020 are once again waiting for the call.

Logistics

Let us start with how this video got made. Over the years, Trump and MAGA-aligned ad makers have been mocked and criticized for using images of Russian troops or European fighter aircraft. This is incompetence to be sure, but it’s undertandable, if not forgivable, that a young editor looking for stock military footage would grab whatever they found first and was cheapest.

Neither incompetence nor ignorance were at work in this production. No lazy editor made a mistake here. Each word and image was chosen for a specific purpose, to speak to a particular part of Trump’s base.

Side note: That the ad mentions mass deportations and isn’t news, tells us how far Trump’s Overton Window has moved.

We should not for one moment believe that the ad was made by a ‘random social account.’ The messaging is too on point. The production value is too high. Yes, it is easier now to create an ad than ever before, but inherent talent and skill are necessary, and at work, here.

Let’s move away from production and to how Trump posted the video to begin with.

When the Trump campaign says an aide “accidentally” posted the video to Trump’s Truth Social account, this is true, but only in the narrowest sense. Aside from Trump himself, the only person who has access, and can post, to Trump’s account is Dan Scavino. To recall, Scavino started as a caddy at one of Trump’s golf courses before rising through the ranks to run social media for the 2016 campaign and the White House.

After Trump’s loss in 2020, Scavino was quoted by Jenna Ellis as saying, "And he said to me, you know, in a kind of excited tone, ‘Well, we don’t care, and we’re not going to leave. The boss is not going to leave under any circumstances. We are just going to stay in power."

We can and should take the logical step of assuming that if Scavino was telling people Trump had no intention of leaving, it is because he heard it from the boneless chicken wing himself.

Politics

Donald Trump is in dire electoral straits, regardless of what national and state polling says. His coalition, such as it is, is smaller, older, whiter, more male, and more extreme than it was four years ago. You can read my deeper analysis here.

The noteworthy part of this episode for the Trump campaign isn’t that they posted a video talking about a ‘reich.’ What’s most interesting is that after the firestorm that erupted, his organization chose to take it down.

Even Donald Trump’s campaign knew how bad this was. They’ve deleted the video from his account.

Donald Trump doesn’t back down. He doesn’t parse his words. He doesn’t have campaign staff clean up comments after he makes (yet another) outrageous remark. No, Trump doubles and triples down: Always.

The reaction they’re seeing from the media and Democrats was so overwhelming that even the turncoats in Mar-A-Lago realized they had a four-alarm fire on their hands. We should and must press our advantage. Trump is only able to hold onto what’s left of his support because they see him as invincible.

This proves he isn’t. One 30-second spot can help pierce his aura of inevitability. Yes, there may be millions of Republican and Independent voters who don’t like Joe Biden, but neither do they have any interest in living in a ‘unified reich.’

Believe Their Words

“Unified Reich” is a specific construction. It’s not “The United States of America” or language that resembles Trump’s desire to reunify a divided people. What ‘unified reich’ represents is a man and movement who see themselves at the top of a power dynamic and 330 million Americans who serve them.

For my ad-making friends out there, here’s an image: One of Donald Trump’s minions erasing the stateline between Illinois and Missouri, blue and red, neighbors. Trump and ‘conservatives’ may espouse ‘states’ rights’ but ‘unified reich’ telegraphs Trump’s desire to recognize America not as 50 independent, federated states, but One (White Christian) Nation Under Trump, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for None.