The Nine Principles of Liberal/Democrat Propaganda

A meme titled “The Nine Principles of Liberal/Democrat Propaganda” is popular on social media. It names real propaganda techniques that political scientists and historians have documented — not in one party, but across the political spectrum.

The problem is attribution. The public record shows that Donald Trump and his movement have used all nine techniques, many of them more than any modern Democratic figure. Calling these techniques a one-party problem is itself Principle 4: blame only the other side.

These nine principles were not invented to describe American Democrats. They come from classical propaganda literature. Analysts studying Nazi, Soviet, and authoritarian messaging documented them throughout the 20th century. This meme labels them a one-party problem while using Principles two, four, five, six, and eight itself. That irony deserves a moment’s pause.

Every technique on this list is documented in Trump’s own words. If these nine things are wrong when Democrats do them, they are wrong when anyone does them. Holding your own side accountable is not weakness. It is what keeps politicians honest.

Frustration with media spin, elite condescension, and political manipulation is legitimate. Much of it is real. But intellectual honesty means applying the same standard to the people asking for your vote.

The Nine Principles of Liberal / Democrat Propaganda

1. Lie Big — Big lies work better than small because the masses won’t believe that anyone would lie “about that.”

2. Focus — Don’t make it complicated, ignore history, keep it simple for simple minds.

3. Repeat — People cannot tell the difference between facts and familiarity. If they hear the same words repeated enough, they become true in their minds.

4. Blame — Never credit the other side, always blame, debase, defame, and dehumanize.

5. Provoke — Outrage, fear, and resentment are more powerful than reason, logic, or facts.

6. Crisis — Issues must be life or death, good vs evil, love vs hate, us vs them. Urgency defeats objection.

7. Emotion — A person might question facts, but they will never question their own feelings. Go emotional.

8. Pander — Ignore reasonable arguments, demonize all who disagree as having bad intentions.

9. No Limits — Morality is for losers. The victor’s morality will not be questioned. No limits.

Analysis

Principle 1 — Lie Big. The meme correctly identifies the “big lie” as a propaganda tool. Historians trace the concept to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who argued that a falsehood of sufficient scale would be believed because ordinary people could not imagine someone manufacturing it wholesale. By the end of Trump’s first term, The Washington Post Fact Checker had catalogued 30,573 false or misleading claims — an average of 21 per day — with the rate accelerating from roughly six per day in year one to 39 per day in year four (Kessler et al., 2021). The most consequential example is the “stolen election” claim, which prosecutors in two separate criminal indictments listed as a deliberate falsehood (United States v. Trump, 2023; State of Georgia v. Trump, 2023). Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, told investigators the claim was “bullshit” (Leonnig & Rucker, 2021). That is a big lie by any definition.

Principle 2 — Focus and Simplify. “Build the wall.” “Lock her up.” “Drain the swamp.” “Make America Great Again.” These are not policy arguments — they are chants deliberately stripped of complexity. Complex immigration law, federal contracting, trade economics, and constitutional governance were each reduced to a four-word slogan that could be shouted at a rally. That is not incidental. Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon described the strategy explicitly: “flood the zone with shit,” meaning overwhelm the information environment with simple, repeated messages rather than coherent argument (Lewis, 2018).

Principle 3 — Repeat. The Washington Post created an entirely new fact-check category — the “Bottomless Pinocchio” — specifically to account for claims Trump repeated more than 20 times after being corrected (Kessler et al., 2021). The category was invented for him; he was its only occupant. New research published in Public Opinion Quarterly found a direct statistical correlation between the number of times Trump repeated a falsehood and the degree to which Republicans adopted it as fact, with the effect strongest among consumers of right-leaning media (Swire-Thompson et al., 2020).

Principle 4 — Blame. During his first term, Trump blamed Barack Obama for nearly every problem he inherited, regardless of cause (Dale, 2020). He blamed immigrants for crime at rates research consistently showed were statistically lower than those of native-born citizens (Flagg, 2019). He blamed Democrats for the January 6th Capitol attack despite his own advisers documenting his refusal to call off the crowd for more than three hours (January 6th Committee, 2022). He blamed election officials, judges, and his own vice president for the outcome of a free and fair election — while never crediting any of them for the administration of that same election.

Principle 5 — Provoke. Trump repeatedly described immigration as an “invasion,” called migrants people who were “poisoning the blood of our country” — a phrase scholars of fascism immediately identified as an echo of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — and told campaign audiences in 2024 that immigrants were coming from “insane asylums being emptied out around the world,” claims his own campaign could provide no evidence to support (Rizzo, 2023; CBS News, 2023). PolitiFact documented that by October 2024, Trump was telling supporters the “enemy from within” — by which he meant American citizens, judges, and journalists — was more dangerous than China or Russia (Sherman, 2024). Outrage, fear, and resentment, delivered at volume.

Principle 6 — Crisis. “This is the last election.” “They’re destroying our country.” “The survival of America itself is at stake.” These are direct quotes from Trump rally speeches (Trump campaign transcripts, 2020, 2024). Every policy disagreement was framed as existential. Every election was the last one. Urgency, as the meme correctly notes, defeats deliberation — and Trump deployed it systematically.

Principle 7 — Emotion. Trump’s rallies are almost entirely emotional performances: grievance, nostalgia, revenge fantasy, and tribal belonging. Policy specifics are rarely mentioned. His 2024 campaign was described by his own pollsters as the most sentiment-driven of the modern era (Goldmacher, 2024). The appeal is not to your analysis of a tax code. It is to your gut feeling that something has been taken from you.

Principle 8 — Pander. Critics of Trump are not simply wrong — they are “evil,” “radical left lunatics,” “sick people,” “treasonous,” and “enemies of the people.” That last phrase — borrowed directly from Soviet propaganda — was Trump’s standard description of the American press (Grynbaum, 2017). Demonizing opponents as not just incorrect but morally corrupt is a textbook method of shutting down the reasonable argument the meme correctly identifies as the target.

Principle 9 — No Limits. Trump became the first sitting or former U.S. president convicted of a felony, on 34 counts of falsifying business records (Associated Press, 2024). He was found liable for sexual abuse in a civil trial (Carroll v. Trump, 2023). On his first day back in office, he pardoned more than 1,500 people charged in connection with the January 6th Capitol attack, including those convicted of assaulting police officers, relieving them of court-ordered restitution estimated at nearly $3 million in unpaid damages (House Committee on Oversight, 2025). When no legal or moral consequence attaches to conduct, that is the operational definition of no limits.

Sources

1. Kessler, G., Rizzo, S., & Kelly, M. (2021, January 24). Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years. The Washington Post.

2. United States v. Trump, No. 23-cr-257 (D.D.C. 2023).

3. State of Georgia v. Trump et al., No. 23SC188947 (Fulton Cty. Super. Ct. 2023).

4. Leonnig, C., & Rucker, P. (2021). I alone can fix it. Penguin Press.

5. Lewis, M. (2018, May). Has anyone seen the president?. Bloomberg.

6. Swire-Thompson, B., Miklaucic, N., Lazer, D., & Ecker, U. K. H. (2020). The role of prior beliefs in the continued influence effect. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(3), 662–687.

7. Flagg, A. (2019, May 13). Is there a connection between undocumented immigrants and crime?. The Marshall Project.

8. January 6th Committee. (2022). Final report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. U.S. House of Representatives.

9. Rizzo, S. (2023, December 18). Trump’s ‘poisoning the blood’ comments echo language of white nationalists. The Washington Post.

10. CBS News. (2023, December 19). Trump blasted for saying immigrants are ‘poisoning the blood of our country’.

11. Sherman, A. (2024, October 30). Trump is talking more about ‘the enemy from within’ near Election Day. PolitiFact.

12. Goldmacher, S. (2024, October 14). Trump’s closing argument: fear and grievance. The New York Times.

13. Grynbaum, M. M. (2017, February 17). Trump calls the news media ‘the enemy of the American people’. The New York Times.

14. Associated Press. (2024, May 30). Trump convicted on all 34 counts in hush money trial.

15. Carroll v. Trump, No. 22-cv-10016 (S.D.N.Y. 2023).

16. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Minority. (2025, March 24). President Trump’s pardons stick taxpayers with the bill for January 6 attack.

17. Dale, D. (2020, September 9). Fact check: Trump has made more than 11,000 false or misleading claims. CNN.