Trump administration's posts echo rhetoric linked to extremist groups

Amna Nawaz:

Just weeks into the new year, the Trump administration has surged ICE agents to American cities, overthrown a foreign head of state, threatened a military takeover of Greenland, and rewritten the history of January 6.

As Liz Landers reports, the administration has rolled out a campaign across departments that draws on images and ideas borrowed from right-wing and white nationalist circles.

Liz Landers:

From the U.S. Department of Labor, a message: "One homeland, one people, one heritage. Remember who you are, American."

It's a video that appears to be part of a campaign now ramping up to sell the administration's efforts to the American people, FOR example, calling on potential ICE recruits to -- quote -- "defend the homeland" from outsiders while featuring heroic images of white men, often from a bygone era.

Then there's this tweet from Friday, an ICE recruitment ad featuring the turn of phrase "We will have our home again" plastered over an image of a man on horseback and a stealth bomber flying in the distance. That's a reference to the song "We'll Have Our Home Again," a white supremacist anthem favored by the Proud Boys.

(Singing)

Liz Landers:

Another image tells supporters to -- quote -- "Trust the plan," the slogan of the right-wing conspiracy theory known as QAnon, which posits there's a global cabal of pedophiles and deep state actors trafficking children and that Trump is fighting it.

It's also a movement heavily involved in the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Last week, the Trump administration published a new Web site rewriting that history to blame Democrats for security failures that day and to justify the president's pardoning of more than 1,500 defendants.

Weighing in on another era, last week, President Trump also sat for a lengthy interview with The New York Times. He was asked about the civil rights movement and told reporters that while the landmark legislation did some good things, he said -- quote -- "It also hurt a lot of people. People that deserve to go to a college or deserve to get a job were unable to get a job. So it was -- it was a reverse discrimination."

A day later, Trump supporter and billionaire Elon Musk wrote "100" above this message on X, which read in part -- quote -- "If white men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. White solidarity is the only way to survive."

That's known as the Great replacement Theory, popular in white nationalist circles that falsely claims the white population is being intentionally replaced by nonwhites.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Liz Landers.

Amna Nawaz:

For more context on what some of these images and posts mean and why the Trump administration is using them, we turn now to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab at American University.

Welcome back. Thanks for being here.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss, American University:

Thanks for having me.

Amna Nawaz:

So we have seen some of these messages before, but this ramping up of their delivery and from multiple official administration accounts, what does all that signal to you at this point, nearly one year into this administration?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss:

Yes, it does feel like a turning point, a turning point in the propaganda campaign, if you will, and the shift to try to change people's minds about what's happening.

I think they feel we're at a moment when ICE has a 57 percent disapproval rating, I heard today, where it's the second least liked federal agency, only after the IRS. And so we have a moment when the American public is seeing what's happening, are watching abuses, are watching cell phone video, especially the recent murder of a protester.

That, I think, is why we're seeing this kind of campaign to try to position what ICE is doing as in the public interest, as safety, and, of course, with a lot of dog whistles, or sometimes not even dog whistles, making racist and conspiratorial claims about what would happen if they don't do it.

Amna Nawaz:

Let's take just a closer look at some of the examples that Liz was just citing there, because some people will look at this and say, I don't see anything wrong with this.

There's the painting, for example, this 1870s painting called "American Progress," was posted by Homeland Security. It features a sort of manifest destiny tableau, talks about a heritage worth protecting.

Why is that significant? Why this reliance on this sort of old imagery and this messaging, this language?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss:

Yes.

So, well, propaganda messaging relies on people's memories of other images that they might associate with positive things even. So we will see even terrorist groups use things like civil rights iconographic messaging, or women's rights iconography to sort of position themselves as a liberating force from oppressors.

We see in that particular image, not just a woman flying over, a white woman, carrying a textbook, right, a really interesting part, that that is known as a kind of education is going to lead the way, we're going to claim what we can about knowledge and make sure that people believe as we claim more space, at a moment when we're also invading Venezuela and making threats about Greenland.

Amna Nawaz:

He's not part of the administration technically, but to have Elon Musk openly retweeting white nationalist language, why is that significant?

(Crosstalk)

Cynthia Miller-Idriss:

Well, white -- this kind of white nationalist language, when it's conspiratorial, it's been linked to terrorist attacks in Pittsburgh, in El Paso, in Buffalo.

I mean, that was the motivating -- in Christchurch, New Zealand, in Oslo, Norway. I mean, hundreds of people have died because of that conspiracy theory, because people believe there is a dire threat posed by multicultural societies and that someone is orchestrating it to make white people disappear. And so that is dangerous.

Amna Nawaz:

There's also this piece that Liz reported on in a recent interview the president gave articulating his views on the civil rights movement, which was the Black-led equal rights push to end legal discrimination and segregation in this country. He said it hurt a lot of people and ended in reverse discrimination.

What does that tell you about where these ideas are coming from and how they're making their way to the president of the United States?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss:

Yes, I think -- well, I think we're seeing several different things.

In that statement, I think one of the things we're seeing is an unedited version of a belief system that has possibly always been there. It's not just new advisers suggesting something. It is a belief that white men are losing ground and that something has to be done to restore male standards, as we heard the secretary of defense say recently to the military, or Mark Zuckerberg that what we really need his masculine energy in the corporate sector, right?

So these kind of gloves are off, right? There's no more hiding those kinds of statements. And I think President Trump is an example of someone who has always believed that kind of thing and is now feeling more emboldened or empowered to say it.

Amna Nawaz:

These are ideas, as you have noted and tracked, they have long been simmering below the surface. Now they're sort of out in the open.

You also cited a number of other big things that are going on, on the planet right now and as a result of U.S. policy. When you see historically these kinds of campaigns, propaganda pushes, is it because they're trying to get a message out or is it distraction from something else?

Cynthia Miller-Idriss:

It's both.

So one of the things we see is that one of the very first things undemocratic leaders do is to try to confuse people, to make -- to say there's alternative facts, there are other ways of seeing the world, to undermine journalism, the media, academics, expertise, scientists, to basically say, this isn't true, whether that's about vaccines or about what we saw in a video was who shot and why a woman who was protesting.

So that kind of confusion, it's what Hannah Arendt said about the Nazis, that you -- when you get people to stop knowing what's true and false, it's very easy for them to stop knowing what's right and wrong.

And so I think that's one of the first things we see, is that confuse and then flood the zone with a lot of different things happening all at once.

Amna Nawaz:

Cynthia Miller-Idriss of American University, thank you for being here. Really appreciate your time.

Cynthia Miller-Idriss:

Thank you for having me.