The U.S. government is now running Trump's campaign ads

A primary marker of a nation's descent into fascism is the intentional conflation of the movement's chosen Dear Leader figure and the roles/mechanisms of government itself. It is not just that the Man runs the Government; the Man is the Government. It exists for him, and could not function without him. Its roles are whatever he desires them to be; its rules are whatever he announces them to be.

This "cult of personality" is a hallmark of all authoritarian movements, and in fascism is combined with a specific focus on hypermasculinity, racial purity, violence for the sake of returning to past glories, and it would all be too terrifying to contemplate right now if Donald Trump were not the biggest stupidest doofus America's fascist chodes could possibly have dug up. Just look at this dipshit.

That is, and again I have to emphasize I am not making this up, an actual ad featuring Trump that is being paid for by the U.S. government. What part of government? Which department is in charge of promoting Angry Man Walking Down Hallway While Vowing To Purge America of Americans? It's not immediately clear.

The ad itself is a Trump 2024 campaign ad, rebroadcast unchanged aside from a "Paid for by the US Government" disclaimer slapped onto it. And it's a deranged work. It consists of nothing but a voiceover rant from the Hallway Walking Guy in question.

"This is the final battle. We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all."

Now, it's self-evident that government funding of this ad is illegal. There's no scenario here in which the U.S. government has a genuine need to fund a public service message denouncing communists, Marxists, fascists, the "sick political class" and the "fake news media." It's pure propaganda, it can have no other purpose other than propping up Dear Decaying Leader, and with any luck there will be enough members of Congress interested in comeuppance, come late January, to find out which particular administration goons wrote the checks for this and purge them from government forever.

I'm more interested in the message. The visuals. The fact that Donald J. Trump and his carefully curated assemblage of bootlickers want this weird outtakes-from-a-slasher-flick video to be their representation of Dear Leader's glorious reign, going into the midterms.

Other political ads try to make their subjects seem relatable. Or if not relatable, vaguely likable. Or if not likable, then at least the ad seeks to convince you that this candidate is not the sort of person who would break into your house and eat your face off.

Not Trump, though! Trump wants the watchers of Fox News, NFL football, college football and Saturday Night Live to come away thinking he might very well eat their face off! Look at him, coming closer and closer! Look at him, staring wordlessly as he shuffles towards you, his deranged inner monologue leaking out into the air! You want colors? You don't get colors! You don't deserve colors! The perfect America will be in black and white, and will consist of a single hallway, and nobody knows where the hallway is but when Donald gets to the end of it then America is going to get what it has coming!

This is the first political ad I've ever seen that tries to boost a candidate by stealing from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. This is how Trump and his advisers want you to see him.

And I'm struck because honestly, this footage could go with any voiceover. You could generate whatever Trump-voiced mumbling you want and slap it on there, it doesn't really make a difference. It's just him walking down a hallway, staring at you, thinking his weird deranged thoughts.

They always made Gargamel out to be the bad guy. Just because he wanted to eat the Smurfs, he was supposed to be the bad guy. I always thought he should be allowed to eat the Smurfs. I would eat the Smurfs, if I were him. Look at the little creeps. They're blue, they probably taste like blueberry pie, right? And maybe they give you powers, when you eat them. Maybe you eat the one with glasses, now you've got nerd powers. There was a chick, too. Just one chick in the whole Smurf town. What was that about.

You can't say it'd be any better or worse, right? Just slap any voiceover on there.

Here I am in a hallway. Why am I in the hallway? You don't get to know. You're in trouble, though. Here I am walking down the hallway, staring at you, like I'm chasing you. This is like one of those dreams where you're in a hallway and something super scary is chasing you, but you can't run very fast because it's a dream. I'm not gonna chase you though, I can't walk any faster than this. The skin on my right hand is sloughing off in big chunks, nobody knows why. We're filming this in black and white because I don't want to do my makeup right now.

Donald is definitely a man who thinks it's better to be feared than loved, a conclusion he probably came to early on in life when he realized that he was a piece of crap and not even his own family would ever smile at him. But he's surround with, allegedly, the very best of what American Naziism has to offer—and not one of those aides was able to convince him that "limping menacingly through a liminal space while the voices of hell cry their ghoulish cries" was probably not the closing message he ought to be going with. Not even if he has all the resources of the U.S. government to illegally spend on it.

What's up with that? What has his team cooked their brains on, that anyone thinks putting this ad out there is better than not doing that?

It's incontrovertible at this point that the Trump administration's comms are entirely in the hands of neo-Nazis. You don't "accidentally" keep using neo-Nazi songs, slogans, fonts, and symbols on government-run social media accounts unless your core team is so stewed in the stuff that they think Nazi fetishism is a normal American thing now. Whether it's ICE, or Defense, or the White House accounts themselves, the minders seem absolutely convinced that heartland voters want to see a government made up entirely of idiot thugs.

Is this a drug thing? Is this not a drug thing? Couldn't tell ya.

But Trump himself seems to think the key to midterm success is giving his audience night terrors and, well, I suppose we'll see how that works out for him.