‘They don’t even bother using subliminal messages’: Trump administration’s Nazi references spark outrage

The world’s richest man set the tone. On the very day of U.S. President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk placed his right hand on his chest and then raised his arm diagonally, a chilling gesture that set off alarm bells in the audience at Washington’s Capital One Arena: was he giving the Nazi salute? Was the Third Reich now reincarnated in MAGA America? One year after the return of Trumpism to the White House — and with it a surge in supremacist ideology — signals and references to fascism, Nazism, and white supremacy are present in numerous communications from the administration.

Trade union leaders were one of the latest to sound the alarm over the government’s supremacist rhetoric. The trigger came last weekend from the Department of Labor, when it shared on its social media an animation featuring a statue of president George Washington, accompanied by the words: “One homeland. One people. One heritage. Remember who you are, American.” Questions quickly arose as to whether the phrase was a reference to one used by the Nazi propaganda machine: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”— that is, “One people, one empire, one leader.”

The public debate heated up: “The U.S. Department of Labor is using an adapted Nazi slogan. This is beyond the lowest depths of depravity,” commented one user on X. “You do know that this is a Nazi phrase from World War II, word for word, right?” another wrote, with a poster from the era showing the slogan alongside an image of Hitler.

But this was not the only incident to generate controversy. On January 8, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem held a press conference behind a lectern bearing the phrase “One of ours, all of yours,” which has also been denounced as a fascist slogan used to justify collective reprisals by Nazism and the Franco dictatorship during World War II and the Spanish Civil War, although the origin of the phrase is disputed. Even so, its appearance in the midst of the backlash and condemnation of the government’s immigration crackdown — following the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis at the hands of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent — has only intensified the criticism.

The rhetoric does not end there. Last Wednesday, the White House posted on X a cartoon showing two teams of Greenlandic sleds with three huskies each, pointing toward a choice between an image of blue skies over Washington or a stormy scene alongside the Great Wall of China and Red Square in Russia. Accompanying the image was a single question: “Which path, Greenland man?” At first glance, it appears simply to reflect President Trump’s desire to annex Greenland, which belongs to Denmark. However, the post was also criticized as a reference to a canonical book in U.S. far-right circles titled Which Way, Western Man?

“Policymakers in this administration and agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and others hardly bother using subliminal messages or coded language anymore,” Wendy Via, president and founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE), told EL PAÍS. “They are blatantly using white supremacist and Nazi references in their imagery and slogans in an attempt to recruit personnel and influence American thought. They don’t even try to defend their actions anymore. Their shameful resurrection of white America propaganda, similar to that of decades past, perfectly illustrates this administration’s vision of what the future of the United States should look like.”

Within this ultranationalist and white-centered framework, the “other” is surplus. That “other” can be a “woke” activist just as easily as a migrant. From the very start of Trump’s second administration, the directive was to defund, weaken, and eliminate everything that was different. Executive orders were thus implemented to eradicate gender ideology or inclusion programs, while at the same time a migration crackdown was set in motion that added some 1.6 million people to the nearly 15 million undocumented immigrants in the country and has expelled more than 600,000 people.

“Since the first Trump administration, our analysis has been that MAGA is a fascist movement based on white supremacy, patriarchal hatred of women and LGBT people, and a ruthless ‘America First’ xenophobia,” said Coco Das, a national leader of the Refuse Fascism organization. For Das, more dangerous than any symbol is “the fact that this ideology is guiding policies and transforming the entire government and society.”

From the outset, the Trump administration has implemented an outreach program that has transported many observers back to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. One episode that drew particular attention was when the White House, together with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), shared on social media an image of the 1872 painting American Progress by John Gast — a symbol of the forced removal and extermination of Native Americans by white settlers and of the theory of “Manifest Destiny” — now repurposed to fit anti-immigrant rhetoric. Alongside the image appeared the words: “A heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending.”

Trump has appeared on posters imitating military salutes, with the aim of recruiting officers for an agency that last year doubled its workforce to 22,000 agents. Likewise, other advertising materials have formed part of the white nationalist rhetoric throughout a full year of Republican administration: from Uncle Sam calling on people to report “foreign invaders,” to other messages from the Department of Labor claiming that “America is for Americans,” a phrase that has been compared to the Nazi slogan “Germany is for Germans.”

Trump has appeared in posters mimicking military salutes, in an effort to recruit officers for an agency that last year doubled its staff to 22,000 agents. Similarly, other advertising materials have been part of the white nationalist rhetoric that has characterized a year of the Republican administration: from Uncle Sam urging people to report “all foreign invaders,” to other messages from the Department of Labor proclaiming that “America is for Americans,” which has been compared to the Nazi slogan “Germany is for Germans.”

The parallels aren’t limited to social media or circles that monitor extremism. This is an era in which ICE has been described as a “modern-day Gestapo,” in the words of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who bluntly compared it to Nazi Germany’s secret police. It is also an era in which the song God, We Will Reclaim Our Home — a tune popular in white nationalist circles and an anthem of the Proud Boys — has once again been sung loudly and openly. Even actor Robert De Niro has compared Stephen Miller, the White House national security adviser and chief architect of anti-immigration policy, to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief.asx

Via, the president of GPAHE, insists that it is impossible to ignore “the dangerous nature of this rhetoric.” “It not only undermines our democratic values, but it supports, and even encourages, in some cases, harmful, if not violent, actions,” she said. “There are many things on which Americans reasonably disagree, but I believe and hope that more and more people are realizing that we are on a path toward authoritarianism, where our nation’s principles are being ignored, and our government is becoming something to be feared.”

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