Donald Trump‘s been eager to put distance between himself and the support his overtly bigoted statements pull from modern-day Nazis, but his efforts have been lukewarm at best.
Trump believes, or at least is willing to present the appearance of belief, a lot of what white supremacists, racists, and homophobes make their core values. He built a platform off the support of these very people, and it is their continued passion for his MAGA policies that allows Trump a position in national politics.
For years, he worked to draw a line between his platform and the Neo Nazis that marched in his name, but it seems he’s left those days in the past. Rammed in between complaints over his criminal trial and the “witch hunt” that led him to his current courtroom woes, Trump’s been showing off a new word and brazenly waving the swastika for all to see.
Trump’s team deleted a recent Truth Social post that made reference to a “unified reich,” but not until it had been on the social media site for upwards of 15 hours. The post, which Trump’s team claims was shared without knowledge of the reich reference, features a video presenting an image of what America could look like following a second Trump victory.
Included in the shared propaganda were predictions of a completely sealed border, the return of the long-dead “American dream,” and, hilariously, an end to all wars. Mixed in with the various headlines were phrases decorating the pages of faux newspapers, and among those phrases one stood out. It claimed that Trump would increase the strength of America through the “creation of a unified reich.”
The term might sound familiar, but it hasn’t been used much in the last 70 years or so. The last time it was frequently seen was during World War II, when one Adolf Hitler was hard at work establishing a reich of his own. The term, which roughly translates to “empire” in German, was used in reference to Hitler’s Nazi regime, which he called the “Third Reich.”
Representatives for Trump eventually disavowed the video, noting that it was not created by their team but rather re-shared while Trump was in court, but it wouldn’t ring so true if Trump himself hadn’t worked for years to paint himself as a Nazi sympathist. Any distance he’s put between himself and the resurfacing ideology was practically demanded by his advisors, and even then it landed as well as a shart in an adult diaper.
Meanwhile, as Trump’s team scrambles to shift the narrative away from both his criminal trial and his Nazi-adjacent ideals, the man himself is showing off a new favorite buzz term. Trump can’t seem to stop himself from overusing a phrase anytime he learns a new one, and the term of the week is “kangaroo court.”
For those whose familiarity with the term begins and ends with Trump’s all-caps Truth Social posts, it is, in fact, a real term. While Trump may well think he’s actually referencing a court filled to the brim with marsupials, the phrase actually refers to “a mock court in which the principles of law and justice are disregarded or perverted,” according to Merriam-Webster.
In Trump’s warped reality, he’s currently enduring “kangaroo court” as he faces up to real crimes committed while he held the highest position in the nation. And as such, he’s peppered a number of his recent posts with the phrase, all while refusing to acknowledge the much more worrying phrase sneakily included in a shared video. Sure, he may not have been aware of the presence of that “reich” reference, but his failure to condemn the language — or even acknowledge it — reeks of implicit support.