Weekly Mind Dump: How Leni Riefenstahl Would've Done Trump's Parade

Trump's "Army Day" birthday parade was a bust. If MAGA wants to make an impact, it must go full fascist. Take lessons from a master propaganda filmmaker.

Week of 6/8-6/14, 2025:

The following essay is written the spirit of Jonathan Swift’s provocative “A Modest Proposal,” i.e., satirical hyperbole intended to mock a hostile movement and leadership.

The opening scene is Air Force One flying above the clouds over the city, its crucifix-like shadow traveling along the ground below. Anticipation and tension build with majestic shots of the classical monuments and noble architecture of the capital in long view and up close so as to impart on viewers an almost vertiginous impression of glory. A sense of divine destiny grows with panoramic scenes of hundreds of thousands of leader-worshippers from all walks of life beating drums and singing in unison the “Ashli Babbitt Hymn.” The leader arrives to cacophonous cheers and applause, proceeding down a lengthy and broad strip flanked by thousands of regimented shock troops and takes his seat at the grandstand, waving humbly at the masses. After being introduced in grandiloquent terms by one MAGA factotum after another, the leader delivers a stirring hour-long speech, the central theme of which is “America Awakes! America is First!” Then ten thousand crack soldiers in dress uniform march in precision down flag-festooned Constitution Avenue, stiff-backed and proud, sharply cranking their necks and directing their gaze at the leader as they pass by. Throughout the nation, the hearts of the leader’s teary-eyed supporters swell and his opponents cringe in fear. This is America in 2025. MAGAmerica.

Donald Trump missed an extraordinary opportunity last week to herald in the second stage of the MAGA Era with pageantry and glory, a moment to cement a strong-fisted, limitless hold on the American people and telegraph to the rest of the world the unassailable power and majesty of the Trumperium Americanum.

Instead, what we got was a limp, torpid amateur hour production that instilled more ridicule than applause, a pathetic disappointment to those anticipating grandeur, and a mocking laughing stock for those bent on bringing Trump down. Soldiers in blah battle dress “cookie dough camouflage” uniforms and period costumes marched languidly and out of step. Bleachers were largely empty. The audio was horrid and the jumbotrons malfunctioned. Under-attended, those who did show up left early. Logistics were poorly organized, with movement of people slowed at chokepoints, trash strewn everywhere and drinking water undistributed. Spaces on the Mall were so vacant that soccer matches could be played on them. Frankly, in true authoritarian fashion, the organizers need to be made an example of.

What the White House needs for such events is a latter-day Leni Riefenstahl and an Albert Speer. Riefenstahl was a German filmmaker in the 1930s and 1940s who produced brilliant propaganda films for the Third Reich, the most well-known being Triumph of the Will, lauded even today as a work of evil genius. Speer was an architect-turned economic czar for Hitler who helped stage-craft the films.

The duo projected the Reich’s power and majesty in the Nuremberg rallies through the use of “pillars of light” — super-bright anti-aircraft lights aimed skyward; a torchlight parade of Sturmabteilung troops, and a powerfully symbolic ritual in which new party flags were consecrated by touching them to the Blutfahne (Blood Flag) that was carried by the Nazis who were shot dead during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch.

An American Riefenstahl would first stretch out a Trump-worship event to four days. Organizers would dragoon thousands of MAGA moonies as well as legions of dependable military service members, ICE and other suborned law enforcement agents to man the spectacle. They would replicate the pillars of light, hold an impressive Tikitorch procession of Proud Boys, Oathkeepers, Three Percenters and J6 releasees. And there would be a solemn ritual of touching fresh American flags with one that was deployed as a weapon by the vanguard which assaulted the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The “Ashli Babbitt Hymn” would copy the spirit of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied”: “Comrades shot by the radical left lunatics and traitors march in spirit fast-together in our columns.”

Leni Riefenstahl was not averse to using concentration camp inmates as extras in her films, following which they were dispatched to their deaths. Trump’s counterpart could use migrants from detention camps prior to their deportation. Again, free labor! To make this all happen according to an ambitious plan, much more than the paltry $45 million thrown at the Army Day/Trump Birthday parade would be needed.

Hitler was beside himself with the success of Triumph of the Will, praising it as an “incomparable glorification of the power and beauty of our Movement.” A British newspaper wrote years later, “Triumph of the Will seduced many wise men and women, persuaded them to admire rather than to despise, and undoubtedly won the Nazis friends and allies all over the world.” American World War II-era filmmaker Frank Capra remarked that the film “fired no gun, dropped no bombs. But as a psychological weapon aimed at destroying the will to resist, it was just as lethal.” Writer Susan Sontag observed that it was “no longer simply the record of reality; ‘reality’ has been constructed to serve the image” — very Trumpian indeed.

So, MAGA minions and President Trump, as you rough up more American politicians, judges, citizens and migrants, as you quash the news media, law firms and universities, why not just go full fascist and put on public events brimming with power and grandiosity aimed at destroying people’s will to resist and showing all and sundry unequivocally just who is in charge now? The spirit of Leni Riefenstahl can help guide you.