The Trump administration is evoking neo-fascism on purpose. I want to say that plainly, because when a pattern is this consistent, it would be naive to call it a coincidence. They may deny the intent, but they keep reaching for fascist symbols. If it looks like a fascist and quacks like a fascist, it probably is one.
When a reporter at opening night of Les Misérables asked Trump whether he identified more with Jean Valjean, the protagonist who steals bread to feed the hungry, or Javert, the villain who treats mercy as weakness, Trump called it a tough one. It’s not a tough one, unless you want to be the bad guy. And he might. In their new book, Regime Change, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan describe a moment when President Trump showed them a list that placed him alongside Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun, and Genghis Khan. By Swan’s account, the president relished the company. Trump is less worried about his approval ratings or the law than about expanding his personal power.
The symbolism is far from subtle. In June, Trump posted an AI-generated image of a giant gilded eagle spread across the Truman Balcony, and the official White House account shared it. People quickly saw its resemblance to the Reichsadler, the Nazi eagle. On October 3, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth addressed Air Force Academy cadets in front of an eagle emblem with rigid, straight-edged wings, breaking from the department’s own brand guide. I served as a Naval officer for ten years, and it’s hard to think of a group that takes symbols more seriously than the military. We salute flags, memorize insignia, and can identify a squadron by its patch. When the people running the Pentagon redesign the imagery, they know what they’re doing.
It’s not just imagery. This spring, a Colorado state intelligence center warned law enforcement nationwide that the Department of Homeland Security’s ICE recruitment posts carried so many white supremacist themes they could endanger the public. Cops were warning other cops about their own government’s memes while DHS called its tactics “bold and effective.” DHS was also urging people to “remigrate,” a word Europe’s far right uses to mean ethnic expulsion and one historians tie to Nazi-era deportation rhetoric. Meanwhile, neo-Nazi forums keep urging their members to join ICE. DHS is preaching to the choir, and recruiting from it.
That’s just the advertising. The product looks like people getting disappeared on their way to work, and a father shot in front of his child, and more than 500 American citizens detained by immigration agents, some held for at least a day without being able to call a lawyer or their family. Deaths in detention have hit a record, in facilities some human rights scholars are calling modern concentration camps. As a reminder, 100% of detainees are human beings.
There is no remorse from this administration. If anything, they’ve doubled down. In late September, the White House spent more than $1.7 million in taxpayer money on TV ads in which the president vows to drive out the globalists and cast out the communists and Marxists. Even Republican Senator Thom Tillis likened it to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. Historian Timothy Snyder, who literally wrote the book on tyranny, called it fascist.
Last week, Hegseth announced that Nidal Hasan, the man responsible for the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009, will be executed by a firing squad of soldiers, and that it will be public. The Pentagon confirmed it will be livestreamed. A military court convicted Hasan and sentenced him to death, but why must there be an audience? Last year, only two countries are known to have carried out public executions: Iran and Afghanistan. Is that the company we want to keep?
England and Wales abolished public executions in 1868, partly out of alarm at what watching hangings did to the crowd. As historian Rosalind Crone told The Guardian, public executions didn’t deter crime, and sometimes had the opposite effect. Psychiatrists have warned that the livestream could cause PTSD in viewers, not to mention what it may do to the soldiers chosen to pull the triggers. As a veteran who was trained to fire torpedoes and Hellfire missiles, I still find it sickening to glorify violence of any kind. But this administration has posted hype reels splicing a montage of actual strikes on Iran with Call of Duty clips. If they can post war slop with such gleeful abandon, turning an execution into “content” is on brand.
Ultimately, we know this administration is not actually trying to deter violence. At Trump’s recent rally for Ken Paxton, a man in a MAGA hat grabbed a protester by the hair and tried to pull him to the ground. The president reacted by saying, “Is there anything like a Trump rally?” Then he joked that the man was going home to his mother, who, Trump added, had voted for him. An American was exercising his right to protest, he was assaulted, and his president mocked him. For this administration, the cruelty has always been a spectacle. Now they just want a bigger audience.
Neo-fascism is upon us. This administration has shown off an eagle that looks like Hitler’s, ridiculed a beaten protester, courted neo-Nazis, and packed warehouses full of humans who are dying in record numbers. Now they want to livestream an execution by firing squad. They want to embolden the Nazis among us, and to provoke everyone else. Elon Musk, who, according to the mother of one of his children, told her he wanted “a legion of children before the civil war,” was just tapped by Hegseth to co-lead the Pentagon’s study on the future of warfare. It would not be an overreaction to be upset, but don’t take the bait.
Some insist we’re nowhere near fascism because they’re naive or haven’t been paying attention. Others are hoping that’s exactly where we end up. Learn to tell the difference. The first group can still wake up, and we can help. Show them how far down the authoritarian playbook we already are, and welcome them into the resistance. To anyone who says I’m fearmongering, consider this: if we sound the alarm and then never lose our democracy, we might feel a little embarrassed for being dramatic. But when the cost of not sounding the alarm could be losing our country to neo-fascism, dismissing the threat is negligent, at best.
So join me. Call your representatives and ask them, on the record, whether DHS should be recruiting with white supremacist messaging and whether the Pentagon should be livestreaming executions. Talk about it with your family and friends, too. And be prepared to show up for your neighbors. All of them.
Valjean wins in the end, by the way. Not because he’s stronger, but because he refuses to stop being decent.
Julie Roland was a Naval Officer for ten years, deploying to both the South China Sea and the Persian Gulf as a helicopter pilot before separating in June 2025 as a Lieutenant Commander. She has a law degree from the University of San Diego, a Master of Laws from Columbia University, and is a member of the Truman National Security Project.
