We’ve been here before. Donald Trump says or does something outrageous, and then walks it back slightly. But his message as a would-be authoritarian – or far worse – gets through.
The latest iteration was a video shared this week on his Truth Social account that (by featuring would-be headlines) promised a “unified reich” if Trump wins a second term as president.
The word “reich”, of course, is closely tied to Adolf Hitler, who called his Nazi empire the “Third Reich”. You don’t have to be a student of world history to understand that instantly.
Despite the outcry in some quarters – including the Biden White House – about the video, the Trump campaign took no immediate action to remove it. It stayed up for 15 hours, amid mild excuses.
That approach was all too familiar. Send the message and then downplay it as unimportant.
After Trump hosted the prominent antisemites Nick Fuentes and Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, he characterized the dinner as “quick and uneventful”.
The 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia? Trump saw “very fine people on both sides”.
A few years later, during the fall of the 2020 presidential campaign – following the social justice protests that roiled American cities – Trump issued some instructions to the white supremacist Proud Boys group. His words should have been disqualifying: “Stand back and stand by.”
Unsurprisingly, the extremist group took it as intended; this was clear encouragement from the then president. They celebrated on social media – and stood by.
Because with Trump, there’s always more of this horror to come.
His campaign speeches these days ring with Nazi rhetoric as he claims that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that his political opponents are “vermin”.
And, yet, he slams any Jewish American who supports Biden. Last month, he opined that any Jewish person who would vote for his rival “doesn’t love Israel” and “should be spoken to”.
He always gives himself just enough of an out, as when he claimed he didn’t know who the Proud Boys were, or that a junior campaign staffer didn’t notice the “unified reich” reference when posting the video.
But these halfhearted walk-backs don’t deny the message.
They are signals – dog whistles – that indicate Trump is more than willing to associate himself with some of history’s most despicable characters and movements.
“How many times will we have to debate if the Nazi imagery is intentional or accidental?” wrote Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the non-profit Jewish Council for Public Affairs. “It is never accidental,” responded Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of authoritarian “strongmen” throughout history.
For the most part, exhausted Americans yawn. They shrug off the latest outrage as regrettable but harmless, just another case of Trump being Trump. The Wall Street bigwig and Republican mega-donor Ken Griffin even told Bloomberg News recently that he might change his mind and support Trump because the former president would “exude a level of strength” that would help to stabilize the world in trying times.
The “strongman” pose, in other words, is working: an authority figure is the one to deal with a chaotic world. Just don’t look too carefully at where the chaos originates. As Trump claimed during the 2016 campaign, the world is in crisis and “I alone can fix it.”
Much of the mainstream media covered this week’s “unified reich” posting as if this were just part of a typical campaign. “Trump’s latest flirtation with Nazi symbolism draws criticism,” one headline in the Hill put it. Yes, and so did President Obama’s decision to wear a tan suit.
Despite all of Trump’s misdeeds – the criminal indictments, the abhorrent words, the sordid relationships, the clear plans to dismantle democratic guardrails – he rolls on undaunted.
With the “unified reich” video, as with all the earlier outrages, you’ll hear no apology, no disavowal, no expression of regret. And certainly no promise that this will never happen again.
It will happen again. After all, it’s working.
Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture
