President Donald Trump left no doubt Tuesday that he was staking his re-election on a remobilization of the voters who put him into office, playing to a sense of their grievance against an elitist culture that looks down on them while he serves as their champion.
And he did it while speaking no words.
The president hit send on a two-minute video on Twitter from a supporter to his nearly 60 million followers as if to remind them why they backed him in the first place. In white words against a black backdrop, the frames scroll by: “First They Ignore You,” “Then They Laugh at You,” “Then They Call You Racist.”
The video, with music seemingly drawn from the theme song of the Batman movie “The Dark Knight Rises,” opens with a tight shot of President Barack Obama then cuts to Hillary Clinton, both clearly cast as politicians who belittle Trump’s hard-line conservative base.
It goes on to show a headline that says he was exonerated by the special counsel, Robert Mueller.
And it adds victory lap scenes of the Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh; a soaring Dow Jones industrial average and strong jobs numbers; churches and flags; and lots of faces of working-class white men.
There is also plenty of footage of Trump, walking along as he did in the promotional ads for his television show “The Apprentice,” the source of his fame that helped catapult him to office.
There were not, however, any scenes from the border with Mexico.
It was not immediately clear why Trump chose to tweet the video on a Tuesday afternoon, roughly nine months before any primary election votes are cast. What was clear was that Trump seemed to have no doubt that he would paint his campaign themes in black and white, and leave the gray to others.
Reached Tuesday evening, Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, said that “we like to share content from die-hard supporters, and this is just another example of how hard Trump supporters fight for us.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.