The Mirror-Image Propagandist

Did Donald Trump simply tell another whopper at a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Dec. 2, when he accused Joe Biden of trying to destroy American democracy, or was something more calculating, deliberative and sinister behind the baseless claim? 

Trump is an impulsive individual who often “projects” his own shortcomings, failings and misdeeds onto others. But he is also a master propagandist. His decision to label Biden a destroyer of democracy is a classic illustration of what political scientists, human-rights activists and historians of fascism term “accusation in a mirror,” or “mirror-image” propaganda — a technique used by demagogues and dictators the world over to impute to their enemies and opponents exactly what they and their party are planning to do.

Mirror-image propaganda reached its fullest expression during Adolf Hitler’s rise to absolute power in Germany. In “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s 1925 autobiographical antisemitic screed composed while he was in prison for the infamous “Beer Hall Putsch,” he blamed the Jews for every conceivable evil, describing them, rather than the Nazis, as an existential threat to humanity. “If, with the help of his Marxist creed,” he wrote: 

the Jew is victorious over the other peoples of this world, his crown will be the funeral wreath of humanity and this planet will, as it did thousands of years ago, move through the ether devoid of men.” 

Fighting against the Jew, he continued, was “fighting for the work of the Lord.”

As the Second World War erupted, the Third Reich’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels increased the volume on mirror-image invective, accusing Jews of plotting to exterminate Germans. In a 1941 pamphlet, he asked, “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews? You know what your eternal enemy and opponent intends for you. There is only one instrument against his plans for annihilation…Victory.” (By “victory,” Goebbles was likely making an early allusion to the systematic elimination of Jews.)  

Mirror-image propaganda was also utilized in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides of the 1990s, and can be seen in the conflicts taking place in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel. As American University professor Susan Benesch, who directs the nonprofit Dangerous Speech Project, has written, the technique works in tandem with disinformation campaigns aimed at dehumanizing the enemy.

“Dehumanization…makes genocide seem acceptable. ‘Accusation in a mirror’ goes further by making it seem necessary,” she instructs.

Trump has long expressed admiration for dictators and strongmen. His political speeches have been littered with dehumanizing diatribes and mirror-image tirades since the day he announced his candidacy in 2015. He kicked off that campaign by stigmatizing undocumented immigrants as rapists and drug smugglers, and later on the campaign trail called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims entering the country. After the election, his first term in office featured an endless string of racist rants not only against immigrants for “invading” the country, but also against Black Lives Matter protesters, whom he labeled “terrorists” and “thugs.” His presidency during the early pandemic similarly was punctuated by descriptions of COVID-19 as “the China virus” and the “kung flu.”

Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric has grown even more extreme over the past few months. As he seeks to retake the White House, he routinely calls his political opponents “vermin” and vilifies immigrants for “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

Facing 91 criminal counts in four separate federal and state prosecutions, Trump returned to mirror-image propaganda at his Cedar Rapids rally, declaring that Biden and his allies “think they can do whatever they want, break any law, tell any lie, ruin any life, trash any norm and get away with anything they want. Anything they want.”

Should he be reelected — and the polls currently show him leading Biden in a head-to-head rematch — Trump promises to go well beyond his rhetoric to transform the presidency into a virtual dictatorship, rounding up undocumented immigrants into mass-detention centers, dismantling civil service protections for government workers, unleashing the Justice Department on his political opponents and invoking the Insurrection Act to quell domestic unrest.

Detailed plans for a second Trump term are set out in Project 2025, an initiative sponsored by the Heritage Foundation and other far-right groups to implement a maximalist version of presidential power. The specific goals of the project are discussed in great detail in the ninth edition of the Heritage Foundation’s “Mandate for Leadership.” First published in 1981, the mandate is designed to serve as a guide for conservative governance; it is updated periodically, usually at the outset of each presidential administration. The current version totals 920 pages.

Prominent Trump surrogates have echoed the Project’s goals. In an appearance on a right-wing podcast in September, Iowa lawyer Mike Davis, believed to be among Trump’s top candidates for attorney general, said he would work to demolish the “deep state,” indict Joe Biden and pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.  “We’re gonna deport a lot of people, 10 million people and growing — anchor babies, their parents, their grandparents,” Davis vowed. “We’re gonna put kids in cages. It’s gonna be glorious. We’re gonna detain a lot of people in the D.C. gulag and Gitmo.”

Kash Patel, rumored to be a possible choice to head Trump’s CIA, made similarly disturbing threats in a recent appearance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “We’re gonna use the Constitution to prosecute those destroying the republic,” he said. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government but in the media. Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you. Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”

No surrogate, however, promotes Trump’s dictatorial aspirations more explicitly than Stephen Miller, who served as a policy adviser to the former president in his first term and is considered likely to join a second Trump Cabinet. In a Dec. 2 post on the social media platform X, Miller went full fuhrer. “A president is the embodiment of the state and the voter,” he wrote in response to the criminal prosecutions against Trump. “So when he becomes liable for his exercise of speech as president it is, in fact, the whole American people who have been robbed of their sovereign authority — authority transferred yet again to the unelected, unreformed and unaccountable. Conservatives not speaking out against these travesties are clearly uninterested in conserving this Republic.”

No one in the Trump camp, including the candidate himself, has yet advocated for outright genocide, although the plan for immigrant detention camps smacks of old-school ethnic cleansing. The election season, however, is just getting started. As the campaign heats up, it is important to remember that a second Trump term will have far fewer legal guardrails than the first. And those guardrails barely held the last time.