The former president recovers the presence of his campaign in the media and social networks
In just 48 hours, Donald Trump has managed to regain the presence of his campaign in the media and social networks that he had lost due to the restriction of his political activities caused by his trial for alleged violation of the regulation of electoral campaigns in New York.
Another thing is that the ends justify the means.
It all started with a campaign advertising video of Trump, posted on his Truth social network on Monday. The images, clearly, were aimed at the most loyal sector of the former president’s followers, who are those who regularly follow Truth, a platform that barely has five million accounts, a minuscule number compared to the 3 billion on Facebook, from the American Meta. , or the 2,000 million of the Chinese TikTok.
The video details “What will happen after Donald Trump wins”, and shows a series of headlines that the media will predictably publish if they assume the presidency. Among them, one that has raised more than just controversy: “A united Reich“. The word Reich It means “kingdom” or “empire” in German, but its connotations are not those. He “Third Reich” It was the political project of domination of Europe Adolf Hitler that caused the Second World War and its adjacent horrors – most especially the Holocaust -, so the reference, although subtle, is very serious.
The wave of criticism led the Trump campaign to remove the ad. But not to apologize or clarify the situation. That is consistent with his policy in these elections. The former president has refused to sign a manifesto that has been accepted by all candidates for six decades, explicitly renouncing the use of violence to win the White Houseand in his rallies he has joked about the possibility of “being a dictator for a day.”
Last week, at the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association – the main lobby of US weapons -, Trump raised what many believe to be his ultimate goal: to be president for life. Thus, the former president raised the possibility of be elected three timessomething that the Constitution explicitly prohibits.
The ad did not seem intended for the general public, but for Trump’s most ultra followers, who will surely have caught the subtle message with clearly Nazi resonances. Already in the 2020 campaign, when he was questioned in one of the televised presidential debates about what the neo-Nazi Proud Boys militia should do, he responded: “Let them step back and be prepared.” Three months later, members of that group participated in the assault on the Capitol.
Media offensive
But Trump’s media offensive on social platforms did not end there. A day later, in one of his usual messages full of capital letters in Truth, the Republican candidate directly accused Joe Biden of trying to murder him. The former president accused the Justice Department of authorizing the use of “lethal force” in the first operation in which he captured dozens of documents related to state secrets that Trump had stolen from the White House.
The accusation was quickly taken advantage of by some of the most distinguished propagandists of the trumpismlike the neo-Nazi congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Twitter account Catturd (literally Cat Turdwhich counts among its fans to Elon Musk) to accuse Biden of trying to assassinate Trump. In reality, Trump was not at Mar-a-Lago when the entry of law enforcement took place, which, moreover, was peaceful.
Ultimately, the FBI’s assassination of Trump on Biden’s orders would be perfectly legal and constitutional, according to the novel legal theory developed by Trump’s lawyers that the president “may order the assassination of any person” – including, as the candidate himself has declared “to someone who is walking down Fifth Avenue” in New York – as long as this is an official act. The former president’s lawyers have even suggested that this murder could be carried out by the Navy SEALs, the famous unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Legally, it doesn’t seem to make any difference whether the SEALs or the FBI do it, so it’s unclear what Trump, Catturd, and Taylor Greene are complaining about.
But Trump’s message had, as always in it, a strategic component of communications control. He hung it just 24 hours before the Justice Department presented the judge in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Aileen Cannonevidence that Trump I had hidden more documentswhich were not discovered until four months after the FBI’s first entry into the president’s residence.
The new data provided to the investigation also allegedly indicate that Trump ordered Mar-a-Lago employees to hide those documents from the area covered by the observation cameras that the FBI placed in the country club after the first inspection. The trial of the Mar-a-Lago documents is the most serious of those facing the former president, but the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, is a trumpist convinced and has decided to postpone the entire process, so that it will not start before the elections or, perhaps, even this year.
