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 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.

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.

Trumpist racist ideology is based on the work of such........

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