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Henk de Berg | 27 March 2025
◇ Historical Parallels | Politics | Trumpism
Photograph of Henk de Berg
At a rally following Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk made a gesture many interpreted as a Nazi salute. [1] On 20th February 2025, at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington DC, the President’s former political adviser Steve Bannon made a similar gesture. “Fight, fight, fight”, he shouted, before raising his right arm in a way indistinguishable from the infamous Hitler-Gruß. [2]
What did their salutation mean? Was it a Nazi salute? Or a Roman greeting? Or, as Bannon claimed, a simple wave? The answer is, it was none of these and, at the same time, all of these. The point was, precisely, that it hovered between these options. Of course, it is possible that the two men were so caught up in the moment that they did not know what they were doing. But that is unlikely. Musk and Bannon had participated in mass events before, and they are far too intelligent not to be aware of how their gesture could be interpreted. My guess is that the salutation was entirely deliberate.
It was a dog-whistle, an appeal to a widely shared feeling among the Trump electorate. Not in order to show their neo-Nazi colours (Musk and Bannon are not neo-Nazis), but to prove that they are not afraid to be politically incorrect. It was an extreme attack on so-called wokeism, but it was more than that. If they had wanted to give a straightforward Nazi salute, they could easily have done so. By leaving things up in the air, they knew they were going to produce much more discussion. Because the best way to make the Internet explode is by saying things that generate not merely opposing sides, but also different interpretations.
As Trump famously put it in The Art of the Deal, “controversy sells”. It sells any products you may have, and it sells you, the seller. This is true of business and of politics. Trump was and is very much aware of this, as indeed are other populists and right-wing extremists. It was even a core strategy behind Hitler’s self-advertising. It is particularly effective when you are the owner of a social-media company, as is the case with Musk and X. Because much of the discussion is on X. We live in an attention economy, in which controversy means more clicks, and more clicks means more money.
Traditional companies want a clear economic framework and market stability. New, innovative, and revolutionary companies like the ones owned by Musk (such as Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink) tend to benefit much more from openness, uncertainty, and even chaos. Moreover, the richer you are, and the more powerful your company is, the more you benefit from a libertarian laissez-faire. As the French priest Henri Dominique Lacordaire famously put it in 1848, “Between the strong and the weak, between the rich and the poor, between the master and the servant, it is liberty that oppresses and the law that sets free”. [3]
This explains Musk’s desire to slash government regulations and get rid of government bureaucracy. It explains why he supports the AfD, the Alternative for Germany political party: not because he is a racist (I really do not think that Musk is a racist), but because his approach to business thrives on disruption and chaos. And it explains why other tech billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are so enamoured with Trumpism. They, too, are not racists, but they do want less government regulation and a more “open” society and a “freer” market.
Unlike his globalist frenemy Musk, Steve Bannon is an economic nationalist. What is needed, he once told an interviewer, is an American nationalism that is about the nurturing of an economy able to sustain the American family and hence American society. [4] This is why Bannon supports not just Trump, but also the AfD and similar European parties. For him, it is the only way to break up the existing world order. And this is why he wants to “take Musk down”, as he put it in a recent interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. [5]
Yet Bannon shares with Musk a disdain for what he calls “the administrative state”, which he views as too bureaucratic, too left-wing, too politically correct, too corrupt, and too elitist. Hence Bannon, like Musk, wants to “deconstruct” the entire government apparatus.
Whatever reasons Musk and Bannon may have to employ extremist sales techniques such as their Hitler-like salutes, they are playing with fire. Too often, clever people have thought that they could control their creations. We only have to look at Dr Frankenstein to know that that can go disastrously wrong.
Henk de Berg is Professor of German at the University of Sheffield and the author of Trump and Hitler: A Comparative Study in Lying (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
References
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy48v1x4dv4o
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2glydm3gmo
[3] Henri Dominique Lacordaire, La liberté de la parole évangélique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1996 [1848]), pp. 342-43.
[4] Keith Koffler, Bannon: Always the Rebel (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2017), p. 95.
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