The Essence of Trump 2.0 Is Violent White Supremacy
The veil is off: the MAGA president is openly taking the country back to its violent, racist past.
In 1980, Republican candidate Ronald Reagan ousted Democratic President Jimmy Carter by consolidating the political realignment that followed the civil rights movement.
Reagan used symbolism to court aggrieved white conservatives, delivering a “states’ rights” speech in the infamous Mississippi town where Ku Klux Klansmen had murdered three civil rights workers 16 years earlier. But his rhetoric reflected the 20th-century evolution in right-wing racial politics, from raw and ugly to sly and subtle.
The following year, a young White House aide explained that evolution in an interview:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘n*****, n*****, n*****,’” Lee Atwater began. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘n****r’ – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights’…abstract.”
“Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these…totally economic things. A byproduct of them is Blacks get hurt worse than whites. ‘We want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing.”
Cynical though it was, the shift reflected progress; modern America had made overt racism broadly unacceptable. That’s why conservative politicians took umbrage when journalists like me spotlighted their veiled appeals.
Nearly a half-century later, Donald Trump’s throwback administration has discarded the veils. Its essence, in plain sight, is white supremacy enforced with violence.
The 79-year-old president also conjures even more repugnant demons. Before his rise, comparing political opponents to Nazis was famously considered too shrill and extreme to be credible.
That’s no longer true. With words, actions, and appointments, Trump invites those comparisons.
Trump 2.0 Rips Off the Mask
After serving in Trump’s first term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Mark Milley called him “fascist to the core.” Former White House chief of staff John Kelly says Trump yearned for military leaders like Hitler’s generals, and insisted, “Hitler did some good things.” (A spokesperson for Trump at the time denied he made the remarks.)
Trump 2.0 shows what they were talking about. His mass deportation campaign, sending masked paramilitaries to rough up and snatch suspected immigrants off the street, has even one high-profile supporter seeing shades of the Nazi agents Hitler deployed to maintain the purity of what he called the genetically-superior Aryan “master race.”
“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo: ‘Where’s your papers?’” Joe Rogan asked his Trump-friendly audience this week. “Is that what we’ve come to?”
Much more fills out the picture.
The administration’s National Security Strategy warns European countries of “civilizational erasure” if immigration turns them “majority non-European.” That’s a euphemism for majority non-white – the same prospect for America that Trump uses to arouse supporters.
His on-again, off-again unofficial adviser, Elon Musk, whose maternal grandparents reportedly backed the Nazis, endorsed social media posts calling for “white solidarity” and immigrant “remigration” while mourning the lost benefits of apartheid in his native South Africa. A stiff-armed Musk gesture during Trump’s inaugural festivities last year resembled a Nazi salute.
“Remember who you are,” the Labor Department implored in a social media post containing an English-language variant of an old Nazi rallying cry. “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.”
ICE recruits new muscle with $50,000 signing bonuses to repel “foreign invaders.” Homeland Security posted a dreamscape beckoning Americans to envision life “after 100 million deportations.”
The administration feeds the anger of struggling white men by casting them as the real victims of racial discrimination. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Andrea Lucas dangles reparations by publicly inviting them to file complaints.
It all shows the presence of appointees like Paul Ingrassia (“I do have a Nazi streak”) and Darren Beattie (“competent white men must be in charge”) – whose appalling baggage would have rendered them unemployable under previous presidents, including Trump 1.0 – is not accidental.
Nor is the violence with which masked ICE agent Jonathan Ross killed Renee Nicole Good. Not long after the killing, another agent approached a woman filming his activities with an ominous warning: “Have you not learned from the past couple of days?” A fundraising appeal on Ross’s behalf attacked “anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish).”
Trump’s paramilitaries use intimidation and brutality to thrill supporters and punish targets. That formula applies abroad as well, for suspected drug smugglers (slaughtered in the ocean), foreign adversaries (invaded for seizure of natural resources), and NATO allies (threatened with conquest).
“We live in a world, in the real world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” fanatical Trump adviser Stephen Miller declared in a CNN interview. The president sent that message by pardoning January 6 convicts who attacked police at the Capitol.
Among those pardoned: Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, who spoke at Trump’s New Jersey golf club after federal prosecutors described him as a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer. Before becoming Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel appeared eight times on the podcast of a man who posted a picture of Hitler’s Mein Kampf captioned, “visionary leadership.”
Trump’s biography provides context.
His father, the son of German immigrants, was once arrested at a KKK event in New York (Donald Trump denied his father was arrested). Trump first gained national notoriety when a Republican president’s Justice Department sued him for anti-Black discrimination in apartment rentals (the case was eventually settled). He has long linked virtue and success to “the right genes.”
The late Ivana Trump once reportedly noted a remarkable book her then-husband kept near his bedside. It was My New Order, a collection of Hitler’s speeches.
John Harwood is the former chief Washington correspondent for CNBC and White House correspondent for CNN. He has interviewed every president from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden. Sign up for ‘The Stakes with John Harwood’ to get all of his columns in your inbox.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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This is the behavior of a security apparatus that’s slipped its leash and started treating the public as an occupied population.
When masked federal agents roam a city with impunity, firing into cars and smearing the dead as justification, you’re not looking at public safety, you’re looking at a domestic intimidation force that’s learned it can operate without consequence.
Call it whatever you want: a parallel police state, a rogue internal militia, an unaccountable enforcement caste. The label matters less than the function, and the function is fear.
And the irony is almost too on‑the‑nose: a country that lectures the world about authoritarianism is now running operations that mirror the very regimes it claims to oppose.
If another nation deployed masked federal units to terrorize its own citizens, Washington would call it a human‑rights crisis. When it happens here, it’s rebranded as “security.” The cognitive dissonance is doing more work than the agencies themselves.
This isn’t drift, it’s design. A state that treats oversight as optional and violence as administrative routine eventually stops resembling a democracy and starts resembling something far more familiar to people who’ve lived under coercive rule.
And the most telling part? The people in power don’t even bother hiding it anymore. They assume the public will adapt to the new normal. That’s the real danger.
I’m working on a new piece about this from a behavioral standpoint that will drop later today. I invite you all to check it out and thank you for writing this piece.
—Johan
Former foreign service officer
Even the January 6 insurrection was part of Trump’s rebellion against a multiracial, multicultural America.