Trump Channels Nazism's Aesthetics, Führer Cult, and Violent Worldview
Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. Our next Q&A will be on Sunday, Nov. 3, 8-9pmET. Our guest will be Sherrilyn Ifill, who is the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University and the former president & director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund. Her longtime advocacy of voting rights and civil rights, and her leadership as a lawyer and an educator, make her the perfect interlocutor for our final Q&A before the U.S. election.
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Donald Trump objects to being compared to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler —so much so that he sued CNN for $475 million, claiming CNN journalists and one freelancer (me) were defaming him by likening him to a dictator. Yet he is the one who has often evoked Hitler and Nazism as positive examples both in his public profile and in private conversations such as with his former Chief of Staff, Gen. Kelly, as well as in his vow to be a dictator “on Day One” of a second Trump term.
This excellent essay by Sidney Blumenthal for the Guardian, in anticipation of Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally today, shows how Trump has evoked Nazism in his dehumanizing language, his concept of an internal domestic enemy, the outreach to neo-Nazis, his desire to have a military loyal to his person rather than the Constitution or the country, his long-held racist views, and more.
I would also add the declaration, in a campaign video, that Trump would be creating “a unified Reich,” and the use of 1930s newsreel aesthetics in that video, complete with a depiction of Trump that follows Fascist visual canons.
This is not subtle. Fascists are not subtle. They threaten you openly by telling you what they will do, and do to you, and they dare you to oppose them. Too often, that opposition comes only when it is too late to prevent their consolidation of power.
Trump is in the fight of his life, and he is intensely threatened by Vice President Kamala Harris, with her positive and precise platforms, the huge crowds dancing with joy in her presence, her expertise as a prosecutor, and her embodiment of the strength of America as a multiracial and multifaith democracy.
Having a rally at Madison Square Garden, in the Nazi tradition, is a sure way for Trump to drive media attention to himself at a time when he is low on energy, incoherent, and falling asleep at his own events —and thus more desperate and dangerous than ever.
What he will say at this rally has little importance, in that we will have heard it all before. As a skilled propagandist, he knows that the repetition of talking points is key to them being accepted. The more people hear a lie, the more that lie becomes familiar, and then may be accepted as truth.
It is the staging and the theatrics that he most cares about: the form rather than the content. He knows that everyone watching and attending knows that he is re-enacting a Nazi show.
So I thought it useful to republish my March 2023 essay on the Fascist aesthetics and values at work in the Waco, TX, event that kicked off Trump’s presidential campaign. As I argue in the essay, the Waco rally symbolizes the marriage of national and foreign extremism and cult traditions so important to Trump’s identity as a American politician out to destroy our democracy.
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The crowd had assembled since early morning and waited impatiently for their leader to arrive. They gazed at the heavens, hoping to see the airplane that would deliver him to them. At last, he came down from the clouds like a deity, circling the airfield for added dramatic effect. As night fell, he entered the sacred space of the rally, where heroes and martyrs of the movement were honored in song and the bond between the leader and his people was renewed.
These scenes describe former President Donald Trump's recent rally in Waco, Texas, which kicked off his 2024 campaign to return to the White House. They are also among the most famous moments of Adolf Hitler’s Sept. 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, which was the subject of Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 documentary Triumph of the Will.
Trump's choice to hold this rally in Waco sends a clear message in the context of American history. Waco has been a pilgrimage site for White power and militia movements since the Branch Davidian religious sect's 1993 showdown with federal authorities. He is paying homage to this tradition and doubling down on his profile as leader of an extremist cult (MAGA).
Yet the stagecraft and rituals seen at this rally also continue the Fascist past. In both Italy and Germany, Fascism evolved out of paramilitary environments, with a cult leader who orchestrated violence. Once in power, Fascists used propaganda to change the public's perception of violence, associating it with patriotism and national defense against internal and external enemies. Rallies were crucial to that end.
Trump used his rallies for years to re-educate Americans in this same manner (see my report for the House Select Jan. 6 Committee). It paid off on Jan. 6. The private army he had carefully cultivated answered their cult leader's call to carry out an unprecedented violent assault on the Capitol to save him from an unjust fate.
Now, as he faces multiple criminal and civil investigations, Trump and his MAGA allies are involved in a massive effort to shift the narrative about Jan. 6, making its violence into patriotic self-defense. The Waco rally may be seen in this frame.
The Nuremberg rally, too, came at a pivotal time for its leader. It puffed up Hitler's personality cult in the wake of his violence against longstanding members of his party who had supported his 1923 beer-hall putsch attempt but now seemed too independent. The June 1934 purge of SA stormtroopers, including their leader Ernst Röhm, sent the message that terror would be managed from the top.
The Nuremberg rally calmed the waters around Hitler after this surprise massacre, presenting him as omnipotent but also adored by ordinary Germans. Triumph of the Will constructs this narrative by starting in the clouds and tracking Hitler as he arrives at Nuremberg airport and emerges to be acclaimed by the people.
The film highlights the rally's climax when the crowd sings the "Horst Wessel Song." It commemorates a young Nazi, murdered by leftists in the years of the movement’s rise to power, who became a symbol of Nazi martyrdom. The Nuremberg rally enshrined victimhood and mourning into regime ritual and justified Nazi violence as national defense.
Like Hitler's beer-hall putsch, Trump's Jan. 6 coup attempt failed, but Trump did not go to prison. Rather, Jan. 6 was a huge success as a radicalization operation, and the GOP validated the attack in 2022 as "legitimate political discourse." In doing so the party tacitly approved Trump's attempt to have an internal threat to his authoritarian power silenced: Vice-President Mike Pence, who refused to collude with the coup attempt on Jan. 6.
Trump's audacious assault on the Capitol and his targeting of a party leader for bodily harm electrified extremists, who see violence as transformative, as Fascists do as well. Yet, as Trump runs for president, he is also using ritual, narrative, and spectacle to transmute that violence into something more palatable. Waco placed Jan. 6 violence within a mythologized history of Trump as the savior of the nation.
So, Trump too came down from the skies. The choice of Waco Regional airport as the rally venue was likely dictated by the desire to stage this genre of authoritarian spectacle. The crowd, there since early morning, grew excited every time a helicopter or aircraft appeared on the horizon.
Calling his followers to a holy site for domestic terrorists continues Trump's elevation of violence as a morally righteous activity necessary to "take the country back,” and bolsters his claim that he is the only man who can deliver justice. "I am your retribution," he told the crowd. "Either the deep state destroys America, or we destroy the deep state," he proclaimed. His campaign distributed signs to Waco attendees that read WITCH HUNT to make sure the media saw the message.
In Nazi Germany, a favorite rally ritual was singing the "Horst Wessel Song," which became the co-national anthem of Nazi Germany. In Waco, crowds sang along with a recording of "Justice for All," performed by the J6 Prison Choir (inmates convicted of violent crimes during the Jan. 6 coup attempt).
Significantly, the song adapts the national anthem ("The Star-Spangled Banner) with a voiceover of Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. In Waco, Trump stood with his hand on his heart as it played, while footage of the Jan. 6 attack screened behind him. Of course. that footage showed only police assaulting the "patriots," whose own violence was erased. That's necessary to convince people that the convicts are "political prisoners" of a tyrannical democracy that must be overthrown. They are martyrs in the making, just like Horst Wessel.
If you know the history of Fascist movements, this makes sense and is even predictable. In Dec. 2022, I told the New York Times that Trump would "double down on his extremist and cult leader profile...and associate with the most extremist elements of society. There is no other option for him.” The Waco rally channels America's extremist past, but it also heralds America's Fascist future if Trump returns to the White House in 2024.