8 Points of Today's Propaganda

8 Tactics of Fascist Propaganda Trump is Using Right Now

Lucas Bean

Jul 29, 2026

https://youtube.com/watch?v=AtU3j33iq6A&is=aob7kWLHRb9NAnvq

During World War II, the United States government studied Adolf Hitler. They wanted to understand exactly how his type of propaganda worked so they could beat it. The Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the agency that eventually became CIA, commissioned psychoanalyst Walter Langanger to build a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler in 1943. And what Langanger documented was the propaganda playbook. Eight rules Hitler used to control an entire country with propaganda. Every single one of the rules is backed by modern psychology.

And every single one of these propaganda tactics is being used against American citizens right now by the Trump regime.

Here are the eight propaganda rules Trump and Steven Miller are using against the American people right now.

Rule number one, never allow the public to cool off. Trump has created a new crisis every single week since he took office. Immigration, tariffs, Greenland, Panama, Canada. Never once a moment of calm. Never a single week where Americans can sit down and process what just happened before the next explosion hits. This isn't unplanned chaos. This is a strategy. Neuroscientist Garren Ree at University College London scanned the brains of thousands of people with different political beliefs and found that conservatives have a larger, more reactive amygdala. That is the fear center of your brain. It's responsible for processing anxiety, rage, and fear. When the amydala is activated, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. That's [clears throat] the part of the brain that's responsible for critical thinking, reasoning, and long-term decision-m. The brain can't be afraid and think clearly at the same time. So, if you keep creating crisises after crisises flowing to the American people, you keep the amygdala firing. And if you keep the amygdala firing, critical thinking never turns back on. A calm population is a thinking population. A thinking population is dangerous to a leader who cannot survive scrutiny. So the leader never lets the people calm down. And this chaos has been running 24 hours a day in the United States since Trump took office again.

Rule number two, never admit fault or being wrong about anything. Trump has never apologized for anything in his entire political career. Not for mocking a disabled reporter, not for calling veterans losers. Not for the Access Hollywood tapes. Not for the insurrection on January 6th. Not once. Not ever. This is not stubbornness. This is a psychological weapon. Researcher Bnee Brown at the University of Houston spent over two decades studying shame. She found that some people have a low tolerance and ability to process shame. They can't separate a mistake from their identity. Brown called it shame resilience. For these people, admitting they did something wrong does not feel like correcting an error. It feels like being exposed is worthless. Trump's followers have fused their identity with his. His wins are their wins. His losses are their losses. If Trump admits fault, his followers have to process what it means that they followed a man who is wrong. And for people with low shame resilience, that does not feel like learning. It feels like dying. So Trump never admits fault, not to protect himself, to protect the psychological structure his followers built around him. One apology and the entire thing cracks.

Rule number three, never concede that there may be some good in your enemy. Every Democrat is evil. Every journalist is the enemy of the people. Every critic is human scum. Every Republican who breaks ranks is a traitor. There is no middle ground. There is no nuance. There is no acknowledgement that the other side might have a point about anything. Psychologists at the Catholic University of Luain in Belgium studied what happens when one group stops seeing another group as fully human. They developed this theory after watching the Belgian public react to the Rwanda genocide. The press and the public showed far more concern for 10 Belgian soldiers killed in the conflict than for the 800,000 Rwans killed in the conflict. They called this infraumanization, the unconscious belief that your group experiences the full range of human emotions, but the other group does not. They feel pain, but not the way we feel pain. They suffer, but not the way we suffer. They are human, but not as human as we are. Once that switch flips, empathy becomes impossible. You can't feel compassion for someone you don't see as fully human. And if you can't feel compassion for them, you can justify anything you do to them. Trump does not just disagree with Democrats. He strips them of their humanity. He calls them vermin or scum or the enemies from within. That language is not careless. That language is a prerequisite for everything that comes next.

Rule number four, never leave room for alternatives. There's only one man who could fix it all. He said it himself. I alone can fix it. Not the party, not the platform, not the institutions, me. Psychologist Ari Krlansky at the University of Maryland spent decades studying people who needed answers and could not deal with uncertainty. He found that some of these people have a powerful psychological need for definitive answers. They can't tolerate ambiguity. They can't sit with uncertainty. They need the story to be simple and the answer to be final. He called it the need for cognitive closure. Alternative solutions create ambiguity. If there are other leaders, other solutions, other approaches, then the followers have to evaluate, compare, and choose one. That requires critical thinking. That requires tolerating uncertainty while everyone figures it out. A leader who eliminates all alternative answers eliminates the need to think. There is only one answer. There is only one leader. There is only one truth. And for the people with a high need for closure, that feels like relief. It doesn't feel like authoritarianism to them. That's why every Republican alternative to Trump was destroyed. Not because they were wrong, but because their existence created ambiguity. And that ambiguity is intolerable to people who need certainty to function.

Rule number five, never accept blame. Everything that goes wrong is someone else's fault. The Democrats, the deep state, Obama, Biden, China, the media, the judges, the prosecutors. Never him. Not once him. Psychologist Zea Kunda at the University of Wateroo studied how people process information that threatens their beliefs. She found that the brain does not evaluate evidence objectively. It evaluates evidence based on what conclusions the brain wants to reach. She called this motivated reasoning. If a person is motivated to believe Trump is right, their brain will process every piece of evidence through that filter. Good news is proof he is right. Bad news is proof someone else sabotaged him. Contradictory evidence is proof that the conspiracy is bigger than you thought. If Trump never accepts blame, his followers never have to process blame. The mental model stays intact. The leader is perfect. The enemies are the problem. And Trump's followers never have to face the terrifying possibility that they gave their loyalty to someone who did not deserve it.

Rule number six, concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame them for everything that goes wrong. Trump says immigrants. That is the current enemy. Your job is gone because of immigrants. Trump says your rent is high because of immigrants. Trump says your neighborhood is dangerous because of immigrants. Trump says your kids' schools are failing because of immigrants. One enemy, every problem. Psychologist Ari Klansky at the University of Maryland studied why ordinary people join extremist movements. He found that the primary driver is not ideology. It's the need to feel like your life matters. He called this the significance quest theory. When people feel invisible, unimportant, or irrelevant, they will grab on to anything that gives their suffering a cause and their life a mission. A single enemy does both. It explains why your life is hard and gives you someone to fight. Yesterday, you were a guy with a dead-end job and no direction. Today, you're a patriot defending your country from an invasion. You didn't get a raise. You didn't accomplish anything anyone noticed. But you alone are standing between America and the enemy at the gate. And that feels like purpose. A scattered set of complex problems is impossible to fight. A single enemy is simple. Simple is satisfying and satisfying is addictive.

Rule number seven. People will believe a big lie sooner than they believe a little lie. The election was stolen. Not a small exaggeration, not a spin on the numbers. It's a massive total complete fabrication that every court rejected, every audit disproved, and every election official, including Republicans, confirmed was false. And tens of millions of people believe it. Anyway, psychologist Lee Ross at Stanford University studied what happens when a person forms a belief based on information that is later completely discredited. And he found something wild. The belief survives even after it being proved wrong, even after the person is told the original information was false. Even after these people are shown proof. Even after they accept intellectually that the information was made up, the belief still persists. Ross called this belief perseverance. The brain does not store beliefs like files that can be deleted. It builds a web of connections around each belief, explanations, justifications, memories, identities. By the time the original information is discredited, the web is already built. And that web does not collapse just because the foundation is removed. A big lie works better than a small one because a big lie generates a bigger web. A small lie is a single claim that can be checked and dismissed. A big lie becomes a worldview. It reorganizes everything in your brain. It becomes the lens through which every piece of new information is filtered. The election was stolen is not a claim. It's an operating system. And you can't uninstall an operating system by showing someone a fact.

Rule number eight, repeat the lie frequently enough and people will sooner or later believe it. Trump said fake news over 2,000 times in his first term alone. He said the election was stolen hundreds of times. Fox News repeated it. Newsmax repeated it. Right-wing podcasters repeated it. Truth Social repeated it. It was repeated every single day from every source his followers trust. In 1961, psychiatrist Robert Lifton studied survivors of Chinese communist brainwashing. Cult leaders don't just control what followers think. They control whether their followers think at all. Lifton called this thought stopping. Here's how it works. Cult leaders preload a response inside the followers head. The second a threatening thought appears, a phrase fires automatically, and the brain shuts off before the thought can fully form. Fake news, witch hunt, deep state, TDS. Trump preloaded four of these phrases into each one of his followers. He did it the same way every cult leader does it. Repetition. Say the phrase every single day. Attach that phrase to fear and anger. Repeat it until the brain does it automatically. Trump said fake news over 2,000 times in his first term alone. Fake news, witch hunt, deep state, TDS. These are the four programmed responses. You spent hours building an argument, gathering sources, collecting evidence, making your case, and a Trump supporter kills it in two words: fake news. before it even registers. Lifton documented the same technique in every cult he ever studied. It works because the followers have no idea it's happening to them. The United States government wrote this playbook down in 1943.

Eight rules, every single one backed by decades of modern psychological research. They made this playbook so Americans could recognize if it ever happened again. It's happening again. The OSS profiled Hitler so America could defeat fascism. 80 years later, a fascist is using the same playbook from inside the White House.