WHAT Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was and did for Hitler, Melania is and does for the Trumps, just for a lot more money.

As in its infamous predecessor, this latest and worst Fuhrer propaganda piece has bad guys and girls not just in front of the camera but behind it.

The movie’s director, Ben Ratner, has successfully shed sexual harassment and rape accusations by multiple women. The film was funded to the tune of 70 million Bezos bucks. The fleshy head of the malign male Amazon flashes across the screen at some inauguration ball, though he doesn’t get as glorious a shot as Elon Musk.

These are just two of the more notorious and camera-hungry among the leeching legions: courtiers, couturiers, caterers and corporate cupbearers; a Jordanian queen, a first lady of France; a pair of priests, tickled silly to find themselves in the frame with Melania in St Patrick’s Cathedral. The monsignor, giggling and hot for camera time, blesses her, though respectfully resists putting his sweaty, starstruck palms on the Maga goddess’s lacquered friseur.

Ratner clearly boned up on Leni’s work before shooting and editing this sequel. Both movies start with the star and saviour of the volk descending from the clouds in a plane. Next is the touchdown and the triumphal entry into the jubilant city. The Mercedes motorcade through the Nuremberg streets flanked by stiff-arming, heil-Hitlering crowds is mapped onto FDR Drive on Manhattan’s East Side.

But the masses don’t mass for Melania, at least not yet.

It’s only down in DC, when this Eva Braun of the Beltway panzers along in yet another motorcade on inauguration day, that we see the flags and the Maga fists as we hear an instrumental version of Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears from back in the Reagan years.

This is the stuff of beer hall putsch karaoke, since the tune can just as well be sung to the alternate words of Trump’s recent utterance: “Sometimes you need a dictator.” Everybody may want to rule the world, but only the Donald can and should.

The meandering vehicle that is Melania badly needs these boosting hits from days when America was great. Without them, the movie won’t get to its destination — the White House with the Trumps back in power — in just under two tough hours.

In between these classics, it is the job of composer Tony Neiman, whose main credits to date are several episodes of Top Chef, to paste up sonic wallpaper that matches the Stalinist decor of Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, and, soon, the White House ballroom. Listening to Neiman’s muted, mournful strings, one expects news that the great leader has died. Many will, no doubt, be hoping for that news.

Neiman does pep things up when Melania is on the move with a musical energy bar branded as Melania’s Waltz. This track’s twirling keyboard riff and electro-frills sound like an AI mash-up of Michael Nyman’s overheated score for the 1993 movie The Piano, cooled down by oscillating harmonic cycles and juxtapositions lifted from Philip Glass, whose recent cancellation of his long-awaited Lincoln Symphony at the Trump Kennedy Centre spurred the thin-skinned president to shut the place down last week.

When Neiman isn’t waltzing with Melania, he’s moisturising her monologues of empathy for the fate of the world’s kids or the Gaza hostages.

Bach comes late to the party. A few bars from the second movement of his Orchestral Suite in D Major are meant to add class to a candlelit dinner where Elon and Jeff and other well-fed opportunists feast on the camera.

That this favourite of classical compilations is known popularly as Air on the G String joins the hit parade with the witlessly self-mocking and self-incriminating numbers already mentioned here. At least the film-makers got something right, if again accidentally: Bach’s orchestral classic found itself back to where it started — as musique de table, not at a feast for princes, but at a black-tied and ball-gowned orgy of corruption.

Following quickly on from the high heels and G-string came another Bach top pick. The Prelude to the First Cello Suite dabbed at the corner of Melania’s perfect mouth and at stains on the damask inaugural tablecloths.

Others might have heard it dabbing at the fragile fabric of the republic.

It would be too much to give the film-makers and first family credit for thinking that this bit of Bach was meant as a barb at Obama, the most haggard of the ex-presidents to appear on screen at the inauguration, and the only one not seen to be putting a brave face on the business. Obama added Yo-Yo Ma’s recording of the Prelude to his election playlist when he won for a second time back in 2012.

I’ve always claimed that Bach’s music can withstand any assault, from banjos to bazookas. After having made it through two hours with Melania, I’m not so sure.

David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, In the Cabinet of Wonders and Handel’s Organ Banquet are now available from False Azure Records.

This is an abridged version of an article that first appeared in Counterpunch.