Is it nostalgia for a time when America was “great” or a return to a time when hate was the driving force in American politics? I’m talking about the Republican Party, or at least those who blindly follow the Cult of Trump. These cultist, and let’s face it, it is a cult, at least a cult of personality, want to turn back the clock, not just to elect Trump to the presidency again, but to spread their belief in hate against immigrants, the LGBTQ+, women, etc. They keep saying that they want to go back to a “more innocent time” and “Make America Great Again,” i.e. MAGA. The problem, there never was a “Great.” What they mean is to go back to oppression, back to a segregated America, back to a time when only white, “Christian” (Protestant, not Catholic) men were in charge of oppressing those they deem unworthy of freedom and prosperity. Instead of being horrified by Trump using the same words as Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, they celebrate it. Maybe they would not go as far as genocide, but they do want to force their cruelty on others. There were many Germans who claimed not to know what the Nazis were doing or had no knowledge of the Holocaust. The only way this claim could have ever been true is through willful ignorance. They did not want to know, so they ignored all the signs.

Leni Riefenstahl, a German director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer, and actress known for producing Nazi propaganda, is a prime example. She followed Nazi ideology and was one of its most effective promoters of its ideology with her propaganda films Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). After the war, Riefenstahl was arrested and found to be a Nazi “fellow traveler,” but she was not charged with war crimes. Throughout her later life, she denied having known about the Holocaust, and was criticized as the “voice of the ‘how could we have known?’ defense.” Shortly before she died in 2003, Riefenstahl voiced her final words on the subject of her connection to Hitler in a BBC interview: “I was one of millions who thought Hitler had all the answers. We saw only the good things; we didn’t know bad things were to come.”

Like the Trumpists of today, Riefenstahl hid her head in the sand because as long as Hitler was effective in his oppression, she believed his lies, or at least wanted to believe. The same is true of the MAGAts who follow Trump. He continues to spread lies that he won the 2020 election, when he did not even come close to winning. He had claimed he had a huge victory against Hillary Clinton in 2016, when in 2020 he lost to Joe Biden by the same number of electoral votes as Clinton was defeated by. Any rational person knows, Trump did not come close to winning, yet they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to follow Trump’s pleas for an insurrection because of “widespread voter fraud.” The only cases of voting fraud that have been discovered were actually committed by Republican voters. 

Their willful ignorance is making Trump the leading Republican presidential candidate. There are dissenters in the Republican Party, or Nikki Haley would not have done as well as she did in yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, but the majority are blindly following Trump’s lies and hateful speech. If (God forbid) Trump is elected again, how many will one day echo the words of Riefenstahl and say, “I was one of millions who thought Trump had all the answers. We saw only the good things; we didn’t know bad things were to come”? It will never excuse their campaign of hate and bigotry in their false claims of “making American great again.”