Donald Trump has a campaign song that is every bit as iconic as Will.i.am’s Yes, We Can anthem for Barack Obama. You might not find it very uplifting, but it moves the audience to tears of pride at his rallies. It’s called Justice for All by the J6 Prison Choir, sung on prison phones by 20 men who rioted at the Capitol. It is accompanied by Trump reading aloud the Pledge of Allegiance and ends with the chant, “USA, USA.” The warped patriotism shocks me every time.
The charity single reached number one on streaming platforms when it was released a year ago. All proceeds go towards legal defence funds for the rioters. On Monday, Trump announced on Truth Social he would pardon the jailed men on day one of his presidency.
“My first acts as your next President will be to Close the Border, DRILL, BABY, DRILL, and Free the January 6 Hostages being wrongfully imprisoned!” Trump wrote. Roughly 500 rioters have received jail sentences and nearly 1,360 have faced criminal charges. Trump has talked before about being a “dictator” on day one. Now we know what his priorities are.
Trump’s message is clear. Anybody who breaks the law on his behalf is innocent in his eyes. He thinks the J6 rioters are the sort of people he can rely on to do his bidding — indeed, the shock troops of the future, should he need them again. It is all of a piece with his own appeal for absolute presidential immunity from prosecution, which the Supreme Court will begin hearing on April 25.
Trump’s former chief of staff recalled his boss saying ‘Well, Hitler did some good things’
Some perspective here: Trump’s raucous campaign stops are nothing like Nuremberg rallies. But there were disturbing revelations from Trump’s former chief-of-staff, John Kelly, this week. Kelly, a former Marine Corps general, recalled his boss saying, “‘Well, but Hitler did some good things.’ I said, “Well, what?’ And he said, ‘Well, [Hitler] rebuilt the economy’.” Trump also allegedly compared the “loyalty” of his own White House staff unfavourably.
“When I pointed out to him the German generals as a group were not loyal to him, and in fact tried to assassinate him a few times, and he didn’t know that,” Kelly told Jim Sciutto, author of a new book, The Return of Great Powers: Russia, China and the next World War. “He truly believed, when he brought us generals in, that we would be loyal — that we would do anything he wanted us to do.”
Should democracies do more to sound the alarm? Frankly, half of America is not listening, anyway. On Saturday, Trump heaped praise on Viktor Orbán, the autocratic leader of Hungary, his guest at Mar-a-Lago. “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said. He added that Orbán was a “noncontroversial figure because he said, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss.”
According to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present, “The point of this genre of propaganda is to continue Trump’s conditioning of Americans to accept authoritarian rule as superior to democracy.”
If so, the tactic is working. Die-hard Trump voters often have tattooed biceps and bumper stickers proclaiming “We the People” from the preamble to the US constitution, but in practice it appears to mean fidelity to one man.
This is the tragedy befalling Ukraine. On his return to Hungary, Orbán said Trump would not continue to send US funds to Kyiv if he returned to power. “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end,” Orbán affirmed.
It is not obvious that Americans care. A Trump voter at a rally was asked whether he would vote for the Russian president Vladimir Putin or Joe Biden. “Not Joe Biden,” he guffawed. “Putin at least has some principles… He loves his country, very similar to Trump.” We are long past groaning this is not Ronald Reagan’s Republican party. The Cold War is ancient history to most voters under 50.
The young might be more interested in Trump’s U-turn over TikTok. Having ginned up opposition to the hugely popular video app during the 2020 election on the grounds that Bytedance, its Beijing-based parent company, was controlled by communist China, he has now declared Meta (Facebook) public enemy number one.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump posted on Truth Social. Today the House of Representatives is set to vote on a bipartisan bill banning the app if Bytedance refuses to sell it, leaving Republicans who towed Trump’s original line nervously looking over their shoulder.
Steve Bannon, the ultra-nationalist former White House adviser, had a ready explanation for Trump’s about-turn. “Simple: Yass Coin,” he posted on social media. By this, he meant it came only a few days after the cash-strapped Trump met billionaire Jeff Yass, whose investment fund owns a $33 billion stake in TikTok and has been lobbying heavily against the ban via the Club for Growth, a Republican group. Trump said he didn’t discuss TikTok with Yass. Perhaps they didn’t need to. Things were understood.
Trump has been strikingly quiet over the war in Gaza, preferring Biden to attract the flak from young voters
Trump has always flattered President Xi of China. His daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner’s children sang in Mandarin for the Chinese leader at Mar-a-Lago in 2017. He also praised Xi last year as an “exceptionally brilliant individual who governs 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.” The flip flop over TikTok is Trump’s way of showing he, too, can command his followers at whim. But it was also canny voter outreach. “There are a lot of people on TikTok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it,” Trump said this week.
It is obvious he is courting the youth vote. Has anybody heard Trump praise Israel’s leader Benjamin Netanyahu recently? I didn’t think so. Trump has been strikingly quiet over the war in Gaza, preferring Biden to attract the flak from young voters (and Muslims in swing states like Michigan). Trump thought he owned Netanyahu after moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and brokering the Abraham accords, and has not forgiven “Bibi” for congratulating Biden on winning the presidency.
In any case, Trump would rather stay friends with Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, another strongman. Everything Trump does is in plain sight. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
