SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
nazis
Trump’s Gestapo Hits the Streets
The Trump regime follows the Nazi blueprints of violence, threats, and street murders. So it's not hyperbole to say it plainly: they are Nazis.
Feb 03, 2026
Trump and many officials in his administration are Nazis. In their policies, their speeches, and their lawless violence, they follow the Nazi playbook of the 1930s. In 1932 the Nazi party gained control of Germany with 37% of the vote. Based on an ideology of Aryan (white) supremacy, they rammed through a series of racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic laws. The Nazis sought to “purify” the nation of non-Aryan blood. Their secret police threatened, beat and murdered suspected opponents. Hitler haughtily ridiculed those targeted by the violence. In all these ways, the Trump administration mimics Nazi plans and programs.
Granted, Nazism relied on one-party authoritarianism, official racism, and the Fuhrer principal. As yet, a two-party system prevails in the US. A further difference between Nazi and MAGA ideology is the ethnic German racism of the former and the white Christian nationalism of the latter. Trump’s strength has been to usurp Christian nationalist resentment about imagined wrongs by immigrants, fear over cultural dilution by foreigners, and certainty that white cultural identity must prevail if the nation is to return to its past greatness. But in creating a cult of personality, ignoring judicial orders, and constituting a lawless federal police, the Nazis have taken possession of the White House ballroom.
Trump’s Gestapo: ICE
Trump’s ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) police resemble the Nazi secret police (Geheime Staatspolizei or Gestapo) in their violence, terror, and even in dress. Hermann Göring’s Gestapo dressed in all-black attire used to strike fear in the masses. The thugs dragged off suspected criminals, surveilled the public, and beat “undesirables” with impunity: Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and political opponents. Hitler believed Gestapo was his "deadliest weapon,” and he gave it unlimited authority to pursue his declared enemies of the regime.
Together with paramilitary “Brownshirts,” the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Gestapo attacked other political parties, disrupting and shutting down assemblies and protests. After the Reichsstag fire of February 1933 that was attributed to Nazi opponents, tens of thousands of Communists, Social Democrats and other political foes were arrested and jailed; many opponents fled the country. A month later, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act that gave the chancellor of Germany–Hitler–the right to punish anyone he considered an “enemy of the state.” The act allowed “laws passed by the government” to override the constitution.
The real question is why are Republicans silent about the Nazi whose illegal acts and Gestapo-like ICE are destroying the White House?
ICE has become a lawless, federal police force beholden only to Fuhrer Trump. Like the Gestapo, ICE refuses to follow the law, the constitution, and direct court orders. It has established a growing network of jails, some of which are abroad, precisely to avoid judicial oversight. Carrying out the president’s bidding, ICE police swarm the streets to terrorize citizens while claiming to make arrests of deviants and criminals. ICE officers have arbitrarily stopped “Black and Brown Minnesotans” on the street at random, demanding to see their IDs. They enter homes without warrants. ICE is now permitting its lower level police to arrest anyone they encounter – but the basis of arrest is usually skin color and accent. Not surprisingly, more than 70 percent of detained noncitizens have no criminal record. But ICE has a quota to cleanse the streets of 3,000 people daily.
The quotas have led “indiscriminate arrests of immigrants,” and to the expansion of the federal network of concentration camps (¨detention centers”) in Florida, Texas and elsewhere. The camps, boasting inhumane conditions, are Trump’s Dachau, the Nazi’s first concentration camp that opened in 1933. The US government is paying hundreds of millions of dollars in cash for additional warehouses that lack toilets and beds, let alone recreation areas, to store its prisoners. The only surprising thing is that the name “Trump” is not emblazoned on the front of these facilities. Like the Nazi concentration camp guards who separated children from parents, ICE is ripping children from their parents’ arms, deporting minors without parents, kidnapping mothers of the streets, and hunting down children in schools; thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025.
If It Dresses Like Gestapo, it is Gestapo
Don Trump says he hires only the best people, but the record of incompetence and high turnover of his government appointees reveals another story: Trump’s upper-level hires are as a rule wealthy, mediocre cronies. Some of their names appear in the Epstein files. To carry out deportations, with the Republican Congress happily earmarking $8 billion for the task, the feds are hiring up to 12,000 ICE agents, reducing their training to six weeks – in fact to 47 days because the Fuhrer is the 47th president, and lowering standards and age requirements so that even 18 year olds can get a $50,000 bonus to join in the mayhem. All of this appeals to immature right-wing young men with infantile fantasies about exercising military power without accountability.
In fact, the recruitment effort for ICE agents relies heavily on right-wing and Nazi slogans and imagery: advertisements talk about taking back and defending the home (land); destroying the flood of foreign invaders; and showing which way the American man leans -- toward law and order, and against invasion and cultural decline. Recruitment targets “male-dominated places and spaces where violence is either required or valorized: gun shows, military bases and local law enforcement,” and elsewhere. The ads depict the work of detaining immigrants as “an epic, heroic quest, with frontier imagery and cowboy-hat clad horsemen.” alongside language like “one homeland, one people, one heritage.”
ICE does not specify a dress code, precisely to make it difficult for people to differentiate between ICE agents, local law enforcement, and even vigilantes who prey on the defenseless. ICE agents usually wear plain clothes or black bulletproof vests. They are fond of grey-hoodies, sunglasses and masks. In the absence of uniforms, ICE impersonators have raped and assaulted women.
Gregory Bovino, until relieved as border control commander last week, left no doubt about his affection for the Gestapo attire. In his Himmler trench coat, as the German media pointed out, Bovino “completed the Nazi look.” Bovino has a long history of reckless violence and racism. He refers to undocumented immigrants as “scum, filth and trash.” He is not shy to utter anti-Semitic comments. In his online presence he augments assault weapons in his photos with inappropriate commentary to justify racial profiling. Bovino’s activities led to a ruling, during the Biden administration, that “masked federal agents brandishing weapons cannot command people going about their daily lives to stop and prove their lawful presence solely because of their skin color, accent, where they happen to be, and the type of work they do.”
But Bovino was quick to violence, and thus a perfect fit for Trump whose Homeland Security chief, Kristi Noem, known for shooting her poorly behaved puppy, abandoned the Biden-era limits. Bovino approved of the shooting of civilian Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, lying to hide ICE culpability. Using similar tactics as the Gestapo, Bovino claims that when his troops use violence, it is the protestors’ fault. He said, “If someone strays into a pepper ball, then that’s on them. Don’t protest and don’t trespass.” He admitted that his storm troopers arrested people based on “how they look.” Bovino’s boss, the Ice-Princess Noem, shares the mantra of racist inequality first and always.
White House Ideology of “Blood and Soil”
Trumpist racist ideology is based on the work of such nineteenth century foundational racists as Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau argued in 1854 that “Caucasian” civilization was superior to all others. But the more that the white race had contact with lesser races – yellow, red and black – the more impure it became, and civilizations collapsed. The Nazis embraced Gobineau, Howard Stuart Chamberlin, and other such anti-Semites. Trump is clear on this point. He said in 2017: “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?”
Nazi ideology was anchored into the idea of ethnic purity of the German peasant who was tied to the land through his blood. The slogan “Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil),” meant that (pure) ethnicity and (more) territory were the key to the great German future. The German Volk, a white, Aryan people, had this blood bond to the land, while Jews and others were a danger to it. Hitler believed that the Volk had been deprived of the right to life and land by impure vermin; many Germans in fact believed that those individuals with the "best" genes had been killed in the Great War, while the weak could easily propagate. MAGA ideologues similarly believe that only white people connected with the blood of the founding fathers can protect the legacy of American greatness – or deserve citizenship.
Leading German scientists, racial hygienists, and right wing political figures believed that the state must intervene to protect pure bloodlines and eliminate the weak – through laws, deportation, isolation, sterilization and eventually murder of people considered inferior: foreigners, Jews, Roma, the handicapped, gays and lesbians so that an ideal Nordic race would thrive. Hitler referred to Jews as blood-sucking parasites, rats and subhumans. The odious Trump calls immigrants “vermin” who poison the blood of the nation, and US citizens of Somali descent “garbage.” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was recently attacked by a crazed MAGA supporter. Trump welcomed the attack, as he urged his followers to “Throw her the hell out!” of the country. The Trumpist effort to clean America of the weak, impure Africans, Muslims, gays and transsexuals thus directly follows that of the Nazis.
Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, the president’s architect of racist violence, has long spouted the ideas of Gobineau, Chamberlain and other racists of racial inequality; black male stereotypes of criminality; and immigrants as polluters of a pure blood stream. Miller rejects diversity. He joined far-right hate groups in university and organized such campus events as an “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” He prefers the company of white nationalists. He was originally scheduled to serve as the headline speaker at the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, after which Trump let the world know that there were “very fine people” among the Nazi protestors. Less than 12 hours after using the National Guard to seize control of Washington, DC’s police in August 2025, the White House used its social media page to display photographs of arrested black men – innocent until proven guilty, who had not yet seen a judge, in their mugshots. No doubt, Miller was behind this.
Immigration and Racism: A Tradition of American Right-Wing Violence
The goal of MAGA immigration policies is to make America more white. (Recall that, in January 2024, Trump torpedoed a bipartisan immigration bill to strengthen the southern border, the better to have immigration fears as a tool in the elections and as cudgel to round up Americans in democratic strongholds on the basis of their accents and skin color.) The attacks on Muslims and immigrants in general recall the racist essence of debates over the 1924 Immigration Act which excluded virtually all Asians and Southern Europeans and Jews from entry to the US.
Miller, who is central figure in shaping the Trump Administration’s agenda for promoting state violence against various enemies, prefers a return to the 1920s with its strict quotas to favor white races over “dark” among immigrants. He regrets the famous US “melting pot” of diversity through which “a unified shared national identity was formed.” Miller further laments the passage of civil rights laws of the 1960s which, he claims, attracted more people from “third world” countries who failed to assimilate in the US. This was the “single largest experiment on a society, on a civilization, that had ever been conducted in human history. The result was increased criminality, welfare cheating, and cultural decline. Miller sees the value of “foreign workers” only in their service to white civilization, and in no way worthy of citizenship.
The ongoing campaign of mass deportation to reverse “cultural decline” recalls the 1940 Nazi plan to deport all Jews to Madagascar – before the Nazis embraced the Final Solution to eliminate the Jews in concentration camps. Trump has been a fan of deportation for years. In May 2017, he signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the country. Tied to the “ban” on Muslims, later overturned in courts, was the threat and reality of child separation to jumpstart “the largest deportation operation in American history” of up to 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States without due process but will full coercive police power of the executive branch. Already, the Trumpists have disappeared people on hundreds of flights, mostly to Central American countries. The Fuhrer is threatening to send US citizens into exile as well.
All of this is fully steeped in white nationalism. The racist-in-chief attacks black majority countries as “shitholes.” He pushes to accept more immigrants from Norway and other white-majority countries, with an exception for white South Africans. He clearly sees the issue not as one of national security, but one of national identity with “whiteness” the only important characteristic of an individual’s worth.
Why Are Republicans Silent?
Trump has been baldly racist since his early days in real estate when he refused to rent his apartments to African-Americans. Lest there be doubt: in 1989, Trump called for the execution of five innocent, but incarcerated black men in a full page advertisement, and he has never retracted that sentiment. The cowardly Trump, who refused to serve in the military, has been quick to call for violence against his nemeses: leaders of countries who refuse to embrace his glory, journalists and protestors at home.
Learning from Nazi tactics, Trump’s politicized Department of Justice (DJ) has accelerated its attack on democrats, majority Democratic states and cities, and the electoral process. The DJ has insisted on the right to examine – and cleanse – state voter rolls. In Georgia in late January 2026, FBI troops raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election office, at Trump’s orders, to seize records, create doubts “ahead of the 2026 midterms,” and overcome the stinging hurt of his 2020 election loss. In fact, the liar-in-chief had tried to convince the Georgia Secretary of State to miscount ballots in 2020. He was assisted in the effort to overturn the fair election by several now convicted felons. And of course, Trump’s ICE regime is directed not at protecting the border, but at attacking cities and states that vote against MAGA: California, Minnesota, Oregon. Any election he loses, Trump claims, is because of cheating election officials and opponents. When he wins, he is silent. If Hitler came to power with just 37% of the vote, why can’t Trump revisit the 2020 election which he lost with just under 47% of the vote?
The Trump regime is corrupt. It follows the Nazi blueprints of violence, threats and street murders. The president fires officials for failing to follow his purge orders. His DOJ is coming after journalists—primarily black and women. It has arrested dozens of them. It carries out early morning raids without warrants. His thugs stop cars, guns drawn, smash windows, drag people to the ground—and shoot protestors. Trump has called for the incarceration of President Obama. Trump owns a copy of Mein Kampf; not surprisingly, in a recent fundraising email, he asked, “Are you a proud American citizen, or does ICE need to come and track you down?” The real question is why are Republicans silent about the Nazi whose illegal acts and Gestapo-like ICE are destroying the White House? Do they fully share his views, or just the ones about poisoning the blood of the nation?Keep ReadingShow Less
'Disgusting': Racist, Homophobic, Antisemitic, and Violent Private Chats of GOP Leaders Exposed
"These are the people who pretend to be offended when called Nazis."
Oct 15, 2025
Is this who they are when not in view of public judgment or recrimination?
That is just one of the questions being widely asked after Politico on Tuesday revealed nearly seven months of grotesque private chats between members of Leaders of Young Republicans, the party's batch of up-and-comers, though already in positions of power within the faction's ranks.
From praising Adolf Hitler to casual use of racial slurs and calls for violence against their opponents, the Telegram chat logs obtained by Politico paint a picture of vile individuals who share a deep loyalty to President Donald Trump and reveled in sadistic contempt for their political enemies, hatred of minorities, and lust for power.
As Politico reports,
They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.
William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”
Reaction to the leaked private messages was swift and full of contempt, if not shock.
"Welcome to Trump’s Republican Party," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) in response to the reporting. "Disgusting."
" Racism, rape, homophobia, antisemitism … Are we greater yet?" asked Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. "Feel safer?"
According to Politico, "the messages reveal a culture where racist, antisemitic and violent rhetoric circulate freely—and where the Trump-era loosening of political norms has made such talk feel less taboo among those positioning themselves as the party’s next leaders."
The members themselves seemed to recognize that if their free-flowing conversations were ever revealed to the public, it would be bad. "If we ever had a leak of this chat, we would be cooked," said one member inside one of the chat threads. But as Politico noted, "they kept typing anyway."
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, an advocacy group, said, "These are the people who pretend to be offended when called Nazis. Where’s the GOP leadership outrage?"
Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) came under fire in the wake of Politico's reporting, given her vocal support for the New York members of the group, many of whom were identified and named in the reporting. Just this summer, Stefanik called them the "backbone" of the Republican Party and key to its future.
Some of Stefanik's top young allies in the party, noted Addison Dick, a member of the New York Democrats' communication team, "praised Hitler, called to put opponents in gas chambers, and repeatedly used racist and antisemitic hate speech in leaked chats." Dick was among those chiding Stefanik for characterizing the reporting as a "hit piece" as opposed to more harshly condemning the vile behavior it exposed among her party's core of young leaders.
For his part, Vice President JD Vance said he would not join in the "pearl clutching" over the leaked chat logs and refused to condemn the myriad examples of racist, sexist, antisemitic, and calls to violence by the group of party officials.
New York Gov. Katherine Hochul, a Democrat, was asked about the revelations during a Tuesday afternoon press conference, and whether it was a case of a few "bad apples" or a "deeper toxicity" within the entire Republican Party.
Q: Politico reported on a group chat of young Republicans. Does this just reflect some bad apples?
HOCHUL: Some bad apples? These are the future of the Republican Party. This is so vile it's hard to find the words to put into context that these are people who are part of one of… pic.twitter.com/aDjnmcQTaJ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 14, 2025
"Some bad apples? These are the future of the Republican Party," Hochul responded. "This was so vile it's hard to find the words to put into context that these are people who are part of one of the two major political parties, and they believe in gas chambers, rape, and discrimination based on the color of people's skin. These are racist, sexist, disgusting remarks."
"And I would say this," Hochul continued, also calling out Stefanik as the highest-ranking elected GOP official in the state for her history of inflammatory and bigoted comments, most notably against New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim, whom Stefanik has called a "jihadist" and "terrorist."
Stefanik, said the governor, should do a bit of self-reflection and "reexamination" of her own "inflammatory words" and of her broader role in influencing these young members and "normalizing" such thinking and rhetoric. As for the members exposed in the chats, Hochul said "there's gotta be consequences" for their behavior and that everyone in the party, from Trump on down, should condemn it.
"Kick them out of the party. Take away their official roles. Stop using them as campaign advisers," she advised. "This bullshit has to stop."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Political Sadism and Defying the Power of Cruelty
While cruelty can be contagious, tyrants fall not just because people oppose them, but because, deep down, most of us long for a world where respect is earned through decency, not domination.
Mar 17, 2025
When I was 10 or 11, I joined up with a group of girls at summer camp to single out a tall, gawky campmate who had reached puberty much earlier than the rest of us. Ganging up on Ilene was a way to bond with the other girls, to reassure myself that I wasn’t an undesirable outsider like her. There was a brief, intoxicating sense of power in it that quickly curdled into guilt when her mom came to speak to the camp counselor about her daughter’s misery.
While I’m embarrassed by this memory, I think under the right circumstances almost all of us are capable of being cruel. It often arises when we’re repulsed by our own insecurity or weakness. We then project it onto others so we can avoid feeling bad about ourselves.
Cruelty is also a tool of power. From authoritarian rulers to internet trolls, cruelty is often disguised as strength, when instead it reveals a profound weakness—an inability to engage with others in good faith. Right now we see it playing out in the White House, as U.S. President Donald Trump tries to assert his control through fear, modeling the dictators he coddles. “Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president,” explains journalist Ezra Klein. Terrorists use terror because they know it’s the only tool they have.
When cruelty becomes fashionable—when it is seen as strength rather than a moral failing—societies descend into darkness.
As a child of Holocaust survivors, the president’s public displays of callousness chill me. His proud, unapologetic heartlessness reminds me how humans are capable of unspeakable brutality. Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom describes cruelty as even worse than dehumanization. Dehumanization is what enables soldiers to enter into battle and kill without moral paralysis. By contrast, Bloom writes, “Cruelty is when you act fully aware of the humanity of the persons you are mistreating or humiliating. In fact, that’s the whole point.”
This sadistic streak was fully evident when Trump and Vice President JD Vance ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, making him grovel for an empty deal and publicly humiliating him for being insufficiently submissive. That the meeting was even televised made it feel like a gladiator fight in the Colosseum. Red meat for the masses. A signal that cruelty is not only acceptable, but to be celebrated. “This is going to be great television,” said Trump, smiling at the cameras as the meeting ended.
And that's what really makes this so dangerous. Because history shows us that cruelty has a seductive pull. The Nazis weren’t an anomaly; they were an extreme manifestation of a tendency that has existed throughout human history. When cruelty becomes fashionable—when it is seen as strength rather than a moral failing—societies descend into darkness. And cruelty, when normalized, begets more cruelty. One sees it in how families often pass down abusive behavior over generations or how everyday Germans behaved under Hitler during World War II. “If you and I were in Nazi Germany,” says Bloom, “we’d like to think we’d be the righteous ones, we’d be the heroes. But we might just be regular old Nazis.”
Ultimately though, while cruelty can be contagious, tyrants fall not just because people oppose them, but because, deep down, most of us long for a world where respect is earned through decency, not domination. Through every dark time in history, there is always a counterforce—a fundamental human longing for justice and decency—that helps bring down oppressive regimes. In the end, cruelty is a learned behavior, but it’s also a choice. It’s easy to be an asshole, especially under duress, while compassion takes practice and intention. If we recognize our own capacity to be cruel, we can opt to counter it or at least refuse to nourish it.
But it’s not that easy. When I hear about the slashing of programs that will result in the death and suffering of millions or how trans people and immigrants are being scapegoated to serve as distractions from billionaire plunder or when Musk says that “empathy will be the downfall of western civilization,” I feel murderous. It makes me feel cruel and stirs a desire for retribution. Yet, if I let the rage take over, I have fallen right into Elon’s trap.
Recently, I was talking with my best friend from high school about Israel when she told me that Muslims aren’t like us, that you couldn’t think of them as people. My gut response was to berate and shame her. But instead, I chose to hold back until I could give more thought to my response. Two days later she called me to tell me that her partner was gravely ill. We still haven't been able to talk about her troubling words, but now I have a better idea of what I will say. I will ask her to share the pain behind her anger. I’m not sure what made her utter the words she used, but I’m pretty sure it had nothing to do with Muslims.
When we do talk, I hope she can acknowledge her misplaced resentment and that we can repair our relationship. I hope I’m able to extend her some compassion and not lash out. I will remind myself that the world won’t get better by giving in to my worst instincts. If we are to defy the power of cruelty, we must choose—again and again—to respond with something better.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular