Little Pink Triangles for You and Me

Republicans and Nazi Chic

In the Trump era, Republicans have become comfortable with Nazi symbols and slogans. Above, Trump shared an editorial from a far right publication, including a pink triangle symbol used to identify gay inmates in the Third Reich’s concentration camps. (Source: The Washington Times.)

To paraphrase an old saying, if someone speaks like a Nazi, salutes like a Nazi, and hangs out with Nazis, that person might be a Nazi.

In the Trump era, Republicans have posted online symbols associated with the Third Reich, have met with Holocaust deniers and outspoken fans of Adolf Hitler, and have courted the support of these extremists.

This flirtation with the Third Reich, of course, flows from the top, encouraged by the co-leaders of the Republican Party, Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

On March 9, on his Truth Social site, Donald Trump shared an image with a chilling history. He platformed an opinion piece from the Washington Times newspaper, which is published by the intensely homophobic and racist Unification Church.

The Washington Times writer celebrated the supposedly more masculine military recruitment drives undertaken by the Pentagon under the Trump administration.

The op-ed effused about a military recruitment ad that featured “a soldier in the gym effortlessly deadlifting 500 pounds and declaring to the camera, ‘Stronger people are harder to kill.’” The writer contrasted that imagery with a Biden-era ad that “showcased an Army officer named Emma marching in an LGBTQ pride parade.”

The story was illustrated by a pink triangle with a slash across it. That symbol appeared on Trump’s Truth Social post when he shared The Washington Times story.

During the Holocaust, Nazis identified categories of concentration camp inmates with different badges sewn onto their uniforms including (most famously) Stars of David on Jewish prisoners.

Other captives were designated by color-coded inverted triangles, including red ones for communists and socialists, black or brown ones for so-called “asocials” (including so-called “vagrants” and Roma), purple ones for Jehovah’s Witnesses, and pink triangles for LGBTQ+ captives.

Hitler’s government represented perhaps the most violently homophobic regime in human history, as the website for the National World War II Museum in New Orleans notes:

The Nazi dictatorship policed, prosecuted, and ultimately murdered thousands of gay men during its 12 years of rule . . . Sterilization, castration, imprisonment, and deportation to concentration camps were among the methods utilized . . . Eventually, 100,000 German and Austrian men were arrested on charges of homosexuality. During World War II, some 10,000 of them perished, mostly in the SS-run camp system.

LGBTQ+ groups understandably reacted with horror that an American president would deliberately use a Nazi symbol of extermination while boasting about an effort to reduce the gay presence in the United States military.

“Such actions are frighteningly reminiscent for both LGBTQ+ people and Jews of our long histories of persecution, which have included tactics we're seeing today, such as scapegoating, book bans, destruction of information access, and control/confiscation of identity documents like passports,” said Idit Klein, the president and CEO of Keshet, a Jewish LGBTQ+ non-profit organization.

This is not the first time that Trump or his acolytes deployed concentration camp symbols to attack perceived enemies.

In June 2020, Facebook removed a Trump presidential campaign ad attacking Antifa, the collective term used for anti-fascist protestors who rose up that year in response to police violence against Black and Brown people.

“Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” the ad said, the words displayed over a red triangle. As the New York Times reported, “Before their removal . . . the advertisements gained more than a million impressions across the Facebook pages of Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.”

The Trump campaign, and much of the right, pretended that Antifa is a centrally organized terrorist group that needs to be stamped out. Historian Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, pointed out the danger associated with deploying such Nazi emblems such as the red triangle.

“This is a symbol that represented the extermination of leftists,” Bray said. “It is a death threat against leftists. There’s no way around what that means historically.”

Trump and his movement have long played footsie with Nazis and brandished antisemitic symbols.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump shared and then quickly deleted an image of his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in front of $100 bills and a Star of David that he nonsensically claimed was a sheriff’s star. The image, that had previously appeared “on an anti-Semitic, white supremacist message board” according to CNN, implied that Clinton was a political tool of Jewish big money interests.

Infamously, after James Alex Fields (a white nationalist fascinated by Adolf Hitler) murdered anti-racist activist Heather Heyer during an August 12, 2017 white supremacist “Unite the Right Rally” filled with Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump said that there were "very fine people on both sides.”

On October 6, 2022, Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee posted a tweet that some would later regret. The tweet simply said “Kanye. Elon. Trump.”

Presumably the post was meant as a declaration of admiration for the increasingly right-wing hip-hop artist Kanye West (who by then was going by “Ye”), the Trump-loving Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and the then-former president himself.

By that point, Ye had publicly echoed an antisemitic smear promoted by the Nation of Islam that, as the American Jewish Committee puts it, “Jews are imposters who have stolen the identity and ‘birthright’ of Black people as the true chosen people of God.”

Ye endorsed Trump for president in 2016. Since then, the African American entertainer had surprisingly promoted a number of white supremacist ideas, including blaming Black people for their suffering in bondage.

In 2018 Ye said, “We’ve been hearing about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” He also speculated that George Floyd, an African American killed by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, died from a drug overdose and not white violence. This echoed a favorite talking point by white supremacists.

At a fashion show on October 4, 2022, Ye wore a t-shirt mocking anti-police-violence protestors. The t-shirt quoted a phrase popular among white nationalists, “White Lives Matter.” He further asserted that Jews control the entertainment industry in order to enslave the Black community.

Less than a week later when another rapper, Diddy, criticized Ye on Instagram for embracing the “White Lives Matter” slogan , Ye accused Diddy of being merely a tool of Jews who trying to “get between me and my money.”

When Mark Zuckerberg, the Jewish CEO of the company that owns Instagram, shut down Ye’s account, Ye posted the following:

I'm a bit sleepy tonight but when I wake up I'm going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE The funny thing is I actually can't be Anti Semitic because black people are actually Jew also.

You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda

Ye was incorrectly referring to DEFCON 3, or Defense Readiness Condition 3, a level of military readiness used by the Pentagon when the nation is under an attack threat. The comment was clearly meant as a warning against the entire Jewish community.

Ye had dinner with Trump at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida on November 22, 2022, two days before Thanksgiving. The performer brought along a friend, Nick Fuentes, whose only claim to fame has been denying the Holocaust and gushing over Adolf Hitler while live-streaming on the internet.

Fuentes was present at the lethal Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, and was streaming live feeds from the ‘Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection. (He currently streams a Neo-Nazi program on DLive, a service favored by racists.)

Before the Florida get-together, Fuentes complained that “Christian Republican voters get screwed over” because “the GOP is run by Jews, atheists, and homosexuals.”

Fuentes had friends in high places even before he met Trump.

Several Republican elected officials participated in a February 2022 meeting of the America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. Fuentes first established AFPAC in 2020. At its 2021 meeting, he convinced Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar to attend in person. In 2022 the group hit the big time, relatively speaking.

Gosar recorded a message for AFPAC attendees, as did Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers and Idaho Lieutenant Gov. Janice McGeachin. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, however, delivered her comments in person.

The 2022 audience also featured numerous well-known white nationalists who have previously been recorded giving Hitler salutes. One speaker, the extremist podcaster Stew Peters, called for the execution of Dr. Anthony Fauci (then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), whom he falsely accused of creating the deadly Covid-19 virus.

Other speakers warned of plots by liberal elites to replace the white race with people of color. Rep. Greene later claimed that she didn’t know who Fuentes was before she accepted his invitation to speak. In her address, she praised the bravery of the crowd which she described as “cancelled Americans.”

During his address, Fuentes hailed Russian President Vladimir Putin as “brilliant” and laughed at those who compared Putin to Adolf Hitler, as if “that’s not a good thing.”

Beyond the AFPAC convention, Fuentes declared in one internet broadcast, “I’m just like Hitler.” He charged that Jews control the world’s finances and media. He also disdained the idea that the United States is a “Judeo-Christian” nation.

“We want a Christian society,” he wrote in a January 2022 post on Telegram, a social media network favored by the racist right. “No prefix, no suffix. We want Christ.”

Trump later claimed that he had no idea that Fuentes was coming to Mar-A-Lago and had never heard of him. Trump said he had only invited Ye to dine with him.

The presumptive Republican nominee for president, however, warmed up to the Nazi. Axios reported that at the Mar-A-Lago meeting, Fuentes told Trump that the president-in-waiting had become too scripted and was at his best when he was “authentic.”

Reporters Jonathan Swan and Zachary Bass wrote, “A source familiar with the dinner conversation told Axios that Trump ‘seemed very taken’ with Fuentes, impressed that the 24-year-old was able to rattle off statistics and recall speeches dating back to his 2016 campaign. . . . Trump at one point turned to Ye and said, ‘I really like this guy. He gets me.’”

Only nine days after the Trump-Fuentes-Ye summit, on December 1, 2022, Ye made news. As NBC political journalists Amanda Terkel and Garrett Haake wrote:

[Ye launched] a lengthy antisemitic tirade on the show hosted on Infowars by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who is known for promoting falsehoods around events like the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.

"I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis," Ye said on the show Thursday. He also repeatedly expressed his admiration for Adolf Hitler.

Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee deleted their October 6 tweet that mentioned Ye, Musk, and Trump. However, Republicans questioned about the Mar-A-Lago gathering focused on Ye and Fuentes and tried to deflect attention from Trump.

Referring to Ye’s comments on Alex Jones’s program, then-House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy said the rapper’s remarks were “disgusting” and “unbelievable” and that the music mogul “must have a mental issue.” Asked about Fuentes, McCarthy couldn’t bring himself to blame Trump for the get-together.

NPR described McCarthy’s discussion with reporters about the incident this way:

"I don't think anybody should be spending any time with Nick Fuentes. He has no place in this Republican Party," McCarthy said. "I think President Trump came out four times and condemned him and didn't know who he was."

When a reporter pointed out to McCarthy that the former president only denied knowing Fuentes — not condemning his ideologies — McCarthy responded, "Well, I condemn his ideology, it has no place in society; at all."

Trump’s dinner buddies have only become more adamant in their praise for the Third Reich in the years since.

In a 2024 lawsuit filed by a former employee of Ye’s private school, the Donda Academy in Simi Valley, California, the performer was accused of claiming “the Jews are out to get me” and “the Jews are stealing all my money.”

The estranged former employee also quoted West as saying the Holocaust was “fake,” Hitler was “great,” and insisting that “Hitler was an innovator! He invented so many things. He’s the reason we have cars.”

According to the lawsuit, at one point he vowed vengeance against his supposed Jewish and gay enemies. "Yeah I am going for the gays! FIRST the Jews, THEN the gays,” the former employee quoted him as saying.

On February 7 of this year, Ye went on another antisemitic tear, posting "I love Hitler" and "I'm a Nazi” on X before deleting his account. However, he placed an ad on the site during the Super Bowl two days later. As USA Today reported, “he directed Super Bowl viewers to his website (now down) where the only item he was selling was a $20 T-shirt featuring a swastika.”

As for Fuentes, by 2023, he posted on the social media site now known as “X” that, 'Hitler was a pedophile and kind of a pagan.' It's like, well, he was also really fucking cool. ... This guy's awesome, this guy's cool."

Fuentes’ America First PAC is still going strong. At the July 2023 meeting, Fuentes said, regarding Jewish people, “We’re in a holy war. And I will tell you this: Because we’re willing to die in the holy war, we will make them die in the holy war.” He went further:

They will go down—we have God on our side—and they will go down with their Satanic master. They have no future in America. The enemies of Christ have no future in this world.

]Former Texas state House Representative Jonathan Strickland from the Fort Worth suburbs met with Fuentes on October 6, 2023, just weeks after the extremist’s declaration of holy war.

Stickland once said, “Rape is non[-]existent in marriage, take what you want my friend!" According to the Texas Tribune, the meeting with Fuentes took place at the Fort Worth headquarters for Pale Horse Strategies, a consulting firm for right-wing candidates that is owned by Stickland. Fuentes arrived around 11 a.m. and left just after 5:30 p.m.

Matt Rinaldi, at the time the chair of the Texas GOP, was seen by a reporter entering the same building where Fuentes and Strickland were meeting but insisted to the Tribune that he didn’t participate in the conversation and had no idea that the Neo-Nazi was on the premises.

Three Texas oil billionaires, Tim Dunn (who is also an End Times preacher), and Farris and Dan Wilks, have in recent years generously subsidized the state’s Republican Party to the tune of more than $100 million. Strickland’s Pale Horse Strategies has been one of the beneficiaries of this deep-pocketed troika. At that the time of his meeting with Fuentes, Strickland was also the president of the Defend Texas Liberty political action committee, also a recipient of Wilks and Dunn largesse.

Defend Texas Liberty donated extensively to Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick and state attorney general Ken Paxton. In March 2024, Paxton avoided prison time for securities fraud after agreeing to a plea deal.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a folk hero among reactionaries after an acquittal for killing two Black Lives Matter protestors in Wisconsin in 2020, joined Strickland and Fuentes at the Fort Worth confab.

Pressure built on Patrick to return the $3 million he received from Defend Texas Liberty after The Texas Tribune broke the news about Fuentes’s meeting with the organization. Patrick, who initially minimized the incident, calling it merely a “serious blunder,” initially refused to give the money back. As the bad publicity continued, he held an October 2023 press conference where he said he was ““appalled about what I am learning about the anti-Semitic activities among some in Texas who call themselves conservatives and Republicans.” Patrick then invested the Defend Texas Liberty donation in Israel bonds.

Fuentes’ influence on the national party, however, continues though perhaps under the radar. “I don’t think Fuentes is the kiss of death that people think he is,” Shane Burley, co-author of Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide To Fighting Antisemitism, told The Intercept. “The world of these online influencers who say outlandish things has moved mainstream. You’re more likely to be around extreme voices and not have to take responsibility for it.”

The October 6, 2022 Republican tweet, of course also mentioned Elon Musk, who infamously celebrated Trump’s second inauguration by giving a Nazi salute to fans of the president at the Capitol One Arena in Washington, D.C. on January 20, 2025.

Musk undermined his claim that that his gesture only meant he was giving out his heart to Trump supporters when, shortly afterwards, he endorsed the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party in Germany. The AfD has roots in the post-World War II German Neo-Nazi movement.

During his virtual appearance at an AfD rally attended by 4,000 in the German city of Halle, Musk seemed to urge party members to stop feeling bad about the Holocaust. Musk said not only that the AfD was the “the best hope for Germany," but also said that among Germans there was "frankly too much of a focus on past guilt and we need to move beyond that . . . Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone . . . their great-grandparents.”

Musk made his remarks a mere two days before Holocaust Remembrance Day, which in 2025 happened on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Amid a backlash, Musk clumsily tried to make a joke of the situation, using the names of Nazi war criminals:

Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming.

Musk capped off the series of unfunny puns with a laugh emoji. Even the Anti-Defamation League, a group ostensibly dedicated to fighting antisemitism but that had offered a lame excuse for Musk’s salute because the ADL supports Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses, finally had enough.

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt posted, “We've said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it. @elonmusk, the Holocaust is not a joke.”

Musk was apparently not chastened. On March 13 he posted that, “Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”

A disturbing number of people in Trump’s circle seem unclear about Hitler’s role in history, World War II, and the Holocaust.

Since he was sworn in on January 20, Trump has proceeded to build what Slate writer Ben Mathis-Lilley called “the most Hitler-Curious Administration in U.S. History.”Nazi chic has characterized much of the Trump movement, Mathis-Lilley wrote. He spotlighted one highly dubious member of the Trump team:

[A] Department of Justice lawyer named Leo Terrell, who is leading a “Task Force to Combat Antisemitism,” retweeted a disparaging post about Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, written by the former leader of a neo-Nazi group called Identity Evropa.

Meanwhile, Joe Rogan, a prominent podcaster popular with young men who endorsed Trump, had as a guest a pseudo-historian, Daryl Cooper, who claims that British conservative leader and then prime minister Winston Churchill, and not Hitler, was primarily responsible for World War II. Cooper claims, contrary to all evidence, that Hitler was seeking a peaceful resolution to what the fringe writer called the “Jewish problem.”

Cooper has influential fans. Vice President J.D. Vance follows Cooper on X and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson labelled him “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Not surprisingly, Trump himself seems largely unfamiliar with the horrors that took place in the Nazi death camps.

While deploring the Hamas treatment of the the fifty-nine remaining hostages in Gaza during an April 7 press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump recalled a conversation he had with one-time captives who had been released by the terror group.

“I said to them, was there any sign of love?” Trump remarked to the startled gathering. “Did the, Hamas, show any signs of like, help? Or liking you? Did they wink? Did they give you a piece of bread extra? Did they give you a meal on the side? … Like, you know, what happened in Germany? . . . People would try and help people that were in unbelievable distress.”

Americans are generally fuzzy about some details concerning the Holocaust. As the Pew Research Center recorded in 2020, “Nearly three-in-ten Americans say they are not sure how many Jews died during the Holocaust, while one-in-ten overestimate the death toll, and 15% say that 3 million or fewer Jews were killed.” (About six million were.) However, unlike Trump, most Americans likely know that the Nazi camp guards were not well-known for their tender mercies toward camp inmates.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth certainly isn’t alleviating that ignorance about the Hitler regime and the Holocaust.

Recently, Hegseth launched a crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion that included deleting references on Pentagon websites to Navajo Code Talkers who boosted the American fight against the Japanese in World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen who broke the color barrier even as they dueled with the Nazi Luftwaffe, and to baseball great Jackie Robinson who served his country even as he struggled against segregation at home.

As part of this erasure of American history, administrators purged four hundred books at the library of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Library staff yanked books about the Holocaust and its myriad horrors, histories of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and work by African American authors. At the same time, white supremacist books were left undisturbed. As the New York Times reported:

Two copies of “Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler are still on the shelves.

Gone is “Memorializing the Holocaust,” Janet Jacobs’s 2010 examination of how female victims of the Holocaust have been portrayed and remembered.

“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is still on the shelves. The 1973 novel, which envisions a takeover of the Western world by immigrants from developing countries, has been embraced by white supremacists and promoted by Stephen Miller, a senior White House adviser.

“The Bell Curve,” which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there. But a critique of the book was pulled.

The Camp of the Saints, incidentally, also served as a source of the “Great Replacement Theory,” the idea that there’s a global plot, perhaps by Jews, to replace the white population in Western societies with a pliant, easily exploited population from the global South. That theory has sparked deadly mass shootings by racists around the world. (I co-authored an essay about the Great Replacement Theory with Betsy Friauf in this book.)

The Trump administration has waged a hypocritical war on antisemitism on college campuses in order to suppress dissent regarding the American relationship with Israel. That clearly serves to deflect attention to its own anti-Jewish worldview, a a set of prejudices that endangers all.

Scrubbing clean the history of Naziism and its carnage, as Hegseth has done at the Naval Academy, leaves the public less able to understand the dangers posed by the Trump movement’s longstanding and widespread flirtation with fascism. This is especially alarming as the Trump administration considers seizing American citizens and deporting them to overseas concentration camps such as the so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador.

It’s easy to dream that the terrors of the Trump era will pass when the president inevitably passes from the scene. It’s not just Trump, however, who has proven himself fascinated with the language and symbols of the Nazi nightmare.

The attraction to fascism runs deep in the broader American right and has become embedded in the vocabulary of the Republican Party. Hopefully we will stop this authoritarian slide before we are all sorted out by red, brown, purple, and pink triangles.

In my next post, I will discuss how the Texas Legislature is killing the state’s public schools and higher education during the current session. A brief reminder: a book I co-authored with Friauf, The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics comes out June 3. It is now available for pre-order. If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to this Substack. As with all the best things in life, it is free.