I am shamelessly ripping off the research of a Twitter buddy of mine, a center-left intellectual who styles himself HistoryBoomer on the app.
Carl is the sort of liberal you used to know and chat with back in the good ol' days before social media turned us all a bit--or a lot--insane. He sees the world differently from you, but still lives on the same planet. In fact, you probably aren't that far apart on most things. He votes Blue, you vote Red, and you both hate the nutcases on either side of the political spectrum.
I read Carl's Substack because it reminds me that there are sane liberals out there, and they probably are a lot more common than you think. You just don't run across them on social media, where I spend too much time. And Carl took on the latest smear against Trump: the "UNIFIED REICH" Trump is a Nazi smear.
Good stuff from @HistoryBoomer Just don't tell him I said so.
— David Strom (@DavidStrom) May 23, 2024
Trump's NOT Fourth Reich https://t.co/tAY88EpD1o
No doubt you have seen the media firestorm about Trump's Truth Social reposting a video from a supporter that had words if you froze the screen and enlarged everything, including "unified Reich."
Donald Trump now openly advocating for “the creation of a unified Reich” in mock newspaper featured in campaign ad. pic.twitter.com/IsVg56qVvV
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) May 21, 2024
The MSM, Democrats, lefty magazines, and even the President of the United States are using this fact to show everybody that Trump is a Nazi.
Finally! We have proof beyond doubt that MAGA is a Nazi movement!
Personally, I would think that in 2024, even if you were a Nazi, you might want to hide that fact when running for election. As far as I know, the electoral success of Nazism in America has been low. But that's just me.
This is where Carl comes in. He did something that everybody else, including me, was too damn lazy or too self-interested to do: figure out what happened. It turns out to be both interesting in itself and revealing about how propaganda campaigns work.
Carl pointed me and his other readers to an Atlantic piece that laid out the facts, and the fact is that the whole "unified Reich" narrative is a bunch of hooey. The words are indeed there but have nothing to do with Trump or even Nazi Germany. They are filler words in a template people use to make quick and dirty videos, including music videos.
This is a template called Newspaper Vintage History Headlines Promo. The words 'unified Reich' appear in there from a Wikipedia page whose text was ripped off as part of the template:
And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
Carl's analysis hits the nail on the head:
What clearly happened is some Trump fan used a quick-and-dirty template to create the video and nobody on Trump’s team noticed that some language in the background had that hot-button “Reich” word in it. Should they have taken more care? Obviously! Of course, so should Candi Staton’s video team!
Trump, however, unlike Ms. Staton, doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt.
Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap.
I think it requires more of a leap than does Graham, but he’s not wrong to remind us that Trump has said an awful lot of awful things.
But still, c’mon man! Do you really think that there is a large base of Third Reich lovers out there, and Trump’s campaign was deliberately signaling to them that he was on board with their goose-stepping dreams? And the method they used was some blurry text on the left side of a briefly shown image?
And the answer from many liberals is, “Yes, we do. He’s a Nazi, and he’s trying to create an American Reich.” It’s these folks who will continue to believe—despite any debunkings—that Trump and his team were deliberately using Nazi words (even though the words in question weren’t even about the Nazis and weren’t written by anyone in the Trump campaign!).
I doubt it; I really do. Trump is not a fascist in any historical way. He doesn’t have a secret Hitler shrine. He’s a narcissist who loves the adulation of the crowd and hates losing. He desperately wants to be back in the White House where he can be a winner and bask in the cheers (that will never fill the void in what passes for his soul). He may also hope that winning will protect him from his legal difficulties and help advance his business interests.
The irony is that Trump is mostly immune from attacks like this by now. We have heard it all before. It is all part of a fake, constructed narrative that has gotten tiresome, as so many hysterical attacks are these days.
No, Samuel Alito is not a secret Christian Nationalist determined to take up an AR-15 and storm the Capitol, and Trump--without doubt the most Zionist president in American history and parent/grandparent to conservative Jews--is not a Nazi.
It is all Narrative building, but the Narrative has been falling apart. In fact, it is backfiring, just as the lawfare has been. Trump is looking better and his opponents are looking worse, as criticisms get discounted and then rejected outright.
The most ridiculous thing is that the Trump Deranged have ensured Trump's elevation to Republican nominee, and are now working to guarantee his reelection. If Joe Biden had pardoned him in 2021 or 2022 he could have ridiculed Trump as a weakling who needed a pardon. He would have looked big, and Trump smaller.
Instead they turned Trump into a fearsome dragon they intended to slay.
How's that working out?
