Donald Trump’s Horst Wessel moment | Will Bunch Newsletter

I know this will probably shock a lot of people, but for once I identify with Donald Trump. On Monday, his lawyers said posting the whopping $465 million bond on his New York State fraud judgment is a “practical impossibility.” It would be for me, too. Of course, I’m not a billionaire. Maybe the media should come to realize the financial wizard behind Trump Vodka and Trump University isn’t one, either.

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Those of us who’ve had the misfortune of chronicling the Donald Trump Era in America have learned by now never to characterize any comment or political rally, no matter how vile, as “a new low,” because the next bottomless pit is always just around the corner. That said, Saturday’s Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio was a dark abyss that the media is still exploring days later.

The never-ending debate over what the 45th president truly meant when he promised a “bloodbath” — maybe just for the auto industry, but maybe for a nation already fearful of a civil war — obscured all the other shocking things the presumptive GOP nominee for a second, non-consecutive term in the White House said that were unambiguous. Like claiming there won’t be another election in America if he loses. Or saying some refugees at the southern border are “not people.”

Then there was the start of the rally, with a version of the National Anthem so horrific that it gets Roseanne Barr off the hook for the worst ever. Heck, Barr’s shrieked ballpark version sounded like Maria Callas compared to this weekend’s opening act in Dayton.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated Jan. 6 hostages,” boomed a man who sounded like a baritone NBA arena announcer tied up and forced to read a ransom note handwritten by Trump himself. What followed was an altered “Star Spangled Banner” as rendered by the so-called J6 Choir — insurrectionists who violently overran the U.S. Capitol and injured scores of police officers on Jan. 6, 2021 and who are held in the D.C. jail, most awaiting felony trials.

It wasn’t the first time that Trump had launched a major rally with the jazz of these felonious punks. In fact, the wannabe 47th president is featured as a voice on the record, renamed ”Justice For All” and briefly boosted to No. 1 on the iTunes chart with help from the king of schlock marketing. The latest airing comes as Trump’s re-framing of hundreds arrested for their riotous activities on Jan. 6 as unfairly treated “hostages” — an insult to the world’s too-many actual hostages from Gaza to Moscow, where U.S. journalist Evan Gershkovich has been locked up for a year — is gaining steam from formerly mainstream Republicans like Rep. Elise Stefanik, now a veep hopeful.

Indeed, Trump’s increasingly forceful promise to abuse the powers of the president to pardon the Capitol Hill insurrectionists — rioters he calls “patriots” because they were willing to upend the peaceful transfer of presidential power on his behalf — is rightly considered as Exhibit A in the ways that a second Trump term would upend 237 years of constitutional norms and plunge America’s shaky democracy into an Orbán-esque form of dictatorship.

But there’s something else about about Trump’s rhetoric, his J6 Chorus, and the revamped national anthem that I find even more disturbing. It’s just the latest incident that makes you wonder how much Trump — who was given a book of Adolf Hitler speeches in the 1980s and later praised some “good things” about the German dictator to his top aide — and his team are modeling the authoritarian rise of the Nazis in the 1930s, either consciously or unconsciously.

Trump’s literal salute to those willing to commit violence on behalf of his MAGA movement — both the arrestees he now calls “hostages” and the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt, hailed by the ex-president as a martyr — is very much in line with the way that Nazis, led by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, invoked slain or jailed thugs as heroes to rally their followers.

This included the victims of Hitler’s own initial insurrection aimed at gaining power — the notorious Munich beer hall putsch of 1923 that killed 16 early Nazis and four police officers. But the most famous Nazi martyr was Horst Wessel, a young member of the Nazis’ paramilitary force officially called the SA, but better known as “the brownshirts” who brawled in the streets with their leftist enemies.

Wessel’s frequent denunciations of the rival Communist Party and his involvement in violent raids into Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods raised his profile among the pro-Hitler brownshirts but made mortal enemies on the far left. On Jan. 14, 1930, on the eve of the Nazi rise to power, Wessel was shot by two Communist Party members under very murky circumstances and later died. Goebbels seized on his death as an invaluable propaganda tool.

The future Nazi minister hailed Wessel in an article as a good Christian who “offer[ed] himself up as a sacrifice,” then lured as many as 30,000 movement members to march through the streets for his funeral and filmed the event. But Wessel and the rallying effect of his supposed martyrdom primarily lived on through music. A marching fight song that Wessel himself composed was given new lyrics and redubbed as “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” meaning “The Horst Wessel Song.”

“The Horst Wessel Song” became not just a Nazi Party anthem, but later the co-national anthem of Germany (along with the “Deutschland über Alles” version of the current anthem) after Hitler took power in 1933. It was even played in churches as Goebbels forged his own version of Christian nationalism. In 1934, as the dictator consolidated his grip, legendary filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl filmed the party’s massive Nuremburg rally for her documentary, Triumph of the Will. The movie starts with “The Horst Wessel Song” as the swastika-painted plane carrying the Führer circles the massive throng before a dramatic landing.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the New York University historian who authored Strongmen, about the commonalities of authoritarians up through Trump, wrote after Trump’s 2022 campaign kickoff in Waco that fascists use rallies and “propaganda to change the public’s perception of violence, associating it with patriotism and national defense against internal and external enemies.” To Ben-Ghiat, the historical line from “The Horst Wessel Song” to the J6 Chorus is especially striking. She writes: “The Nuremberg rally enshrined victimhood and mourning into regime ritual and justified Nazi violence as national defense.”

Triumph of the Will supposedly survived as a cautionary tale about propaganda and mass manipulation, but apparently it’s now an instructional video for a new generation of Hitler clones. The ritual fetishizing of today’s brownshirts who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 would be alarming if it were the only party-like-it’s-1934 flashback from the Trump campaign. Instead, it’s just one more sour Wagnerian note, along with calling enemies “vermin,” dehumanizing migrants, and agreeing that he’ll be a dictator, but “only for a day.”

Trump is currently flying high and humming his own Horst Wessel song all the way to the White House. When will Americans wake up and hear the music?

Question: Why are Washington Democrats so INCREDIBLY bad at opposition research? Neither Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden seem to know how to turn Donald Trump’s flaws into Democratic votes. And the DNC didn’t discover [ousted Rep.] George Santos’s lies. — Michael Nelson (@MikeNelson) via X/Twitter

Answer: Mike, you’re absolutely right. It was appalling that Long Island Democrats — not to mention major local media like my former employer, Newsday — failed to figure out Santos was a complete fraud until after he was elected. I think Democrats — branding themselves as the milquetoast “fairness” party — don’t put enough into oppo research because they’re not as ruthless as the GOP in using what they find out. But I also think Trump is a different story. The fact that he won in 2016 after the exposure of the Access Hollywood tape showed that he’s somewhat bulletproof: His fans hate the liberal elite messengers of such stories and discount the message. It’s why Dems should be laser-focused on getting out their voters, because MAGA won’t be moved.

Responders to last week’s question about the bill racing through Congress that would likely ban the popular, largely Chinese-owned social media app TikTok showed yet again that the people are smarter than their representatives. All agreed with me that banning the app, even with the national security fears around foreign ownership, would be dangerous and counter-productive. “Once a country starts ‘banning’ any kind of speech, it’s on the road to dictatorship, a road not too far away as it is,” wrote Armando A. Pandola Jr. Meanwhile, Martin Plutzer hit on a more basic problem: ”I have found the videos very helpful ... It’s also very entertaining.”

📮This week’s question: New Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and other city leaders are increasingly hostile to so-called “harm reduction” approaches for curbing drug abuse. Parker just pledged “not one dollar” for needle-exchange programs long supported with city dollars by her predecessors. Do you support a prohibition-oriented approach to the drug crisis, or do you agree with advocates who say “harm reduction” — not just needle exchange but supervised injection sites — is a better and more humane approach? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Needle Exchange” in the subject line.

I don’t usually do “theme” editions of the newsletter, but the missteps that plunged the world into darkness in the 1930s are very much on my mind as America seems condemned to repeat the past. Probably a lot of younger readers don’t know about Neville Chamberlain, who was Great Britain’s prime minister in the fateful years leading up to World War II. But history recalls Chamberlain as a weak-kneed leader desperate to bargain his way out of a military conflict with the rearmed Adolf Hitler. In 1938, Chamberlain flew to Munich with other European leaders to hand over a region of Czechoslovakia to the German strongman, insisting his passivity had gained “peace in our time,” Instead, the Nazis were emboldened by his rivals’ timidity to invade Poland just a year later.

Attorney General Merrick Garland is a Neville Chamberlain for our time. His passive approach to justice for Donald Trump over his role in Jan. 6 and related efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election is the biggest reason that none of the GOP presumptive nominee’s four felony trials have happened yet. The Washington Post reported that many Justice Department prosecutors chafed as Garland waited an unnecessary, inexplicable 22 months to finally name a special prosecutor to look at Trump’s role. Even after that, Garland’s department has acted questionably. Last week, we learned that Trump’s Manhattan trial over hush-money payments to adult-film star Stormy Daniels would be delayed another month — largely because the Justice Department had failed to turn over the relevant documents.

History’s heroes are the folks who took risks and acted boldly, like federal judge John Sirica who was relentless in keeping the Watergate case alive in 1973 when Richard Nixon’s cover-up appeared poised to succeed. Those who work to avoid conflict and let the world’s bullies intimidate them and run wild become the second coming of Neville Chamberlain. In making “fairness” his career mantra, Garland has been massively unfair to the American people in the ultimate case of justice deferred becoming justice denied. President Joe Biden, whose career might end because of the feckless Garland, can’t fire his AG because it would look too political. But it’s not too early to make a case for historians to remember a cowardly prosecutor as one of the 21st century’s true villains.

OK, I mildly cheated on this one: The linked Attytood post is from this date in 2009 — reprinting one I originally published on March 18, 2005, in the very first few days of the blog’s existence. The post about the large-scale U.S. government lying and bad journalism that accompanied 2003′s invasion of Iraq is important because a) the media’s Iraq failures are what convinced me to become an opinion journalist and b) this is a reminder that disinformation, as dangerous as it’s become, wasn’t born yesterday. In the fog of war as the U.S. began bombing Baghdad and other targets, it was widely reported that a Saddam Hussein hideout, Dora Farms, had been hit and maybe Saddam was wounded or his sons were killed. None of it ever happened. Read the rest: “Anniversary of a lie.”

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