Trump campaign’s ‘unified Reich’ post underscores disturbing plan for 2025

The Trump campaign on Tuesday had to delete a video posted to the former president’s Truth Social account that referenced a “unified Reich” – a term often associated with Nazi Germany.

“That’s not the language of an American president. That’s not the language of any American. It’s the language of Hitler’s Germany,” President Joe Biden said.

The text in the video appeared to have been copied from a Wikipedia page about the First World War and referred in part to developments before Hitler came to power. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the video was created by someone outside the campaign and shared by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the use of the word “Reich”.

This is not Donald Trump’s first time playing the race card in the run-up to an election in which immigration is emerging as a pivotal issue. US Border Patrol is reporting record numbers of migrants crossing from Mexico and opinion polls show voters are fearful.

Last October, Trump described immigrants as disease-ridden troublemakers who were “poisoning the blood of our country”. Adolf Hitler wrote about “contamination of the blood” in Mein Kampf. But the message was the same.

On 16 December at a political rally in Durham, New Hampshire, Trump regurgitated similar white-supremacist poison. Undocumented migrants were, he told the flag-waving crowd, “poisoning the blood of our country. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world”. There was no condemnation from American conservatives.

It appears decency is dead in a Republican Party in thrall to Trump’s nativism. Honourable exceptions like Liz Cheney have been cut adrift.

But the focus on Trump’s crude language can obscure the elaborate and unprecedented attack on immigration the far-right has planned for 2025.

Read Next

The judge in the Trump trial is right to be furious about ‘side eye’

James Ball

The judge in the Trump trial is right to be furious about 'side eye'

Read More

A shoo-in for a Trump II administration would be his anti-immigration guru Stephen Miller, described by some as one of the most “evil” people to have worked in the first Trump White House.

According to one report, Miller suggested using US predator drones in 2018 to blow up migrant boats full of unarmed civilians.

“He [Miller] has been the leader of this from the beginning,” says political scientist Patricia Crouse at the University of New Haven. “He was the one that pushed to stop ALL immigration to this country and I believe he wanted to deport people that were legal citizens. He’s a real piece of work. And he will most likely be a part of a second Trump administration.”

During Trump’s first – relatively-restrained – regime we saw a Muslim ban travel ban and Latin American child migrants separated from their parents and kept in cages. Miller’s paw prints were all over those policies.

In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers revealed the plans to slash legal immigration into the US, with revivals of Trump’s first-term border policies, including bans on people from certain Muslim-majority nations. There could also be a revival of a Covid 19-era policy of refusing asylum claims on the grounds of public health risks, although the government would cite dangers posed by other infections such as tuberculosis.

A Trump II administration would probably up the ante, to include mass arrests, detention and deportation, with millions per year to be expelled. Federal law enforcement would be restructured to direct “massive portions” of staff toward immigration enforcement. The National Guard would be deployed, too.

Todd Schulte, the president of the FWD.us migrant advocacy group, tweeted amid the row over the Reich video: “It is very very important to understand that if he returns to office, President Trump will have very different tools to enact an awful immigration agenda. From family separation at the border to stripping away work authorisation for millions.”

Migrants arriving via illegal routes would be rounded up and kept in sprawling camps awaiting expulsion. In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be cancelled.

And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Trump would probably redirect money in the military budget.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller has said. “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

The hard right’s determination to attack immigration is underlined by Project 2025, a policy wishlist for a second Trump term, produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, thought to have been written and informed by Trump insiders including Miller.

The Niskanen Center civil society think tank warned in February that Project 2025 would have “complex and destructive” effects.

“It isn’t simply a refresh of first-term ideas, dusted off and ready to be re-implemented. Rather, it reflects a meticulously orchestrated, comprehensive plan to drive immigration levels to unprecedented lows…”

It noted that Project 2025 would exclude many populations from filling critical gaps in the agricultural, construction, hospitality, and forestry sectors – so the US economy would probably suffer. It even bars Americans from qualifying for federal housing subsidies if they live with anyone who is not a US citizen.

The Niskanen Center says such proposals bear little resemblance to “traditional conservative immigration priorities like promoting merit-based immigration, fostering assimilation”.

Much of Trump’s first-term immigration was challenged – and sometimes blocked by the courts. But the next time around, the right will fancy its chances with a new, hardcore right-wing majority in the nine-seat Supreme Court, after Trump filled the place of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg , who died in September 2020, with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration. Daca is an Obama-era programme (also known as the “Dreamers” programme) that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. After Trump tried to end it, the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.

Miller has said Trump would try again to end Daca.

Trump thinks that hardline rhetoric on immigration will get him re-elected. In February, his lackeys on Capitol Hill sank the bipartisan Senate proposals for increased security at the Mexican border for fear such a bill would help Biden’s poll ratings.

Biden and the Democrats are concerned that the US public’s anger over high immigration levels might sink them at the polls.

An April CNN poll found that 76 per cent of registered voters viewed immigration as extremely or very important to their presidential vote. As such, the Democrats appear prepared to advocate some policies they formerly attacked the Republicans for espousing. Earlier promises of an easy path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people brought into the US illegally as children – “Dreamers” – were left out of bipartisan proposals.

Senate Democrats plan to force another vote on Thursday on the bipartisan package, in an attempt to boost Biden’s record on stemming immigration.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this week insisted it was “the strongest, most comprehensive border security bill we’ve seen in a generation”. But Republican resistance means it is unlikely to get the 60 votes needed to pass.

This week’s offending “Unified Reich” video starts with text heralding a “TRUMP LANDSLIDE” along with a voiceover saying, “What happens if Donald Trump wins?”

In terms of immigration, we already have a pretty good idea.

The issue, and the Biden administration’s handling of it in the next six months, might well decide whether Trump gets the chance to enforce his draconian vision of a whiter America with semi-closed borders.

Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants, named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback”. We should probably take him at his word.