It's about painting people as "crazy" and, if possible, convincing them to doubt themselves as well. Gaslighting isn't just about telling people they can't trust the evidence of their own eyes. That's why the term "gaslighting" is so perfect to describe Trump's favored propaganda style. (In reality, Trump himself is a conspiracy theorist who promotes other conspiracy theorists, such as QAnon.) We're told, no matter how many times Trump "accidentally" promotes white nationalism, that he should forever be extended the benefit of the doubt, and not doing so makes one "crazy." Whenever progressives publicly notice, say, that Trump is using a logo borrowed from fascist organizations for his campaign, they are immediately accused of imagining things and of being conspiracy theorists. A whole lot of this is also about trolling the left.
Trump and his associates feign innocence and write off the white supremacist signaling as accidents or coincidences not simply to escape accountability for what they're doing. And we're meant to believe that Trump's policies, which sure do seem to be geared towards shipping out as many nonwhite people, have no relationship to the white nationalist mission of turning the U.S. That is fairly difficult to believe, since a search for "Trump logo" doesn't have any lion iconography, except for those sites that are reporting on the video.Ī whole lot of mistakes and coincidences are piling up to explain how often Trump's aesthetics, beliefs, attitudes and talking points align so nicely with the stuff being churned out by all the formerly-fringe white nationalist groups out there. The fan site that made the video is, of course, claiming innocence, saying that logo - lovingly animated in the video - was simply pulled off Google. We're meant to believe that Trump is merely a bumbling fool and not a deliberate promoter of fascism when he repeatedly echoes white nationalist claims that "both sides" do it and that "antifa" is the real problem, instead of facing the fact that actual white nationalists have been behind multiple terrorist attacks over the past four years. We're also meant to believe it's just coincidence that Trump eagerly promotes the talking points offered by fascists that falsely blame the left for street fights that were actually instigated by hate groups. We're meant to believe, seemingly, that the president is repeatedly victimized by white nationalists, who exploiting his garden-variety racism to get him to signal-boost their ideology. It's just an accident when he says overtly anti-Semitic things. We were also told that Trump didn't mean it when he repeatedly tweeted propaganda from white nationalist groups. And when Trump hosted a hornet's nest worth of racists, right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists at the White House, that was because he supports "free speech" and not because he totally agrees with such people. We've also been assured it was an accident or miscommunication whenever Trump associates flash a hand gesture popular with white nationalists. "Stuff like this is how the Trump campaign can show alignment but give themselves room to pretend it's accidental if they're called on it."
His campaign has determined that they can't win in 2020 without them," Melissa Ryan, a digital strategist dedicated to fighting right-wing extremism, tweeted in response to Trump's new lion logo.
"White Supremacists are a key constituency for Trump. That's the strategy in play: Wink at the fascists, and whenever you get called out on it, play innocent. The group's name, and apparent ethos comes from a quote from Benito Mussolini that Trump approvingly tweeted in 2016: "It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep."īack then, Trump claimed it was an accident born of ignorance that he approvingly quoted Mussolini, just as the DOJ claims it was an unfortunate accident that it mailed out links to white supremacist sites. The logo has been traced back to a pro-Trump fascist group called the "Lion Guard." It has been used by the white supremacist site VDare, which also happens to be the same site whose articles the Department of Justice recently forwarded to immigration court employees, launching a minor scandal. Mediaite has a detailed account of the internet sleuths, including Brooke Binkowski, formerly of Snopes, who pieced together the apparent source of this lion logo.
This time, the instigating incident is the discovery that a fan video tweeted by Donald Trump featured a logo - a lion's face built out of red stripes and blue stars - that was apparently, um, "borrowed" from a white supremacist group so unhinged that it managed to get banned from Twitter, a site that is always reluctant to boot fascists. Oh boy, it's time for another round of Let's Pretend the President Isn't Air-Kissing White Nationalists.
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