As its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis intensifies, the Trump administration is leaning into messaging that borrows from phrases, images and music about national identity that have become popular among right-wing groups.
On Jan. 9, two days after a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent's shooting of Renee Good sent tensions in Minneapolis to a fever pitch, the Department of Homeland Security posted to social media an image of a man on a horse riding through a snowy, mountainous landscape with the words "We'll have our home again." That's the chorus to a song about ousting a foreign presence by a self-described "folk-punk" band that the Proud Boys and other far-right and white supremacist groups have used.
The next day, the Department of Labor posted on X: "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American." Several Trump critics on the social media site drew a parallel to a notorious Nazi slogan, "One People, One Realm, One Leader."
And this past week, as President Donald Trump stepped up his pressure campaign to claim Greenland, the White House posted an image on X that showed a dog sled facing a fork in the trail, one that leads to an American flag and the White House and another that leads to the Russian and Chinese flags. Above the image was the phrase, "Which way, Greenland Man?"
The post refers to a meme that riffs off the title of a notorious white supremacist book titled “Which Way Western Man?” The administration had already used the framing in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruiting post last year, which asked, “Which way, American Man?”
The flurry of posts has renewed criticism about a recurring pattern in Trump's second term — the sometimes cryptic use of imagery popular with the far right and white supremacists in the administration's campaign to rally the nation behind its immigration crackdown, which it frames as a battle to preserve Western civilization.
Administration tells critics to ‘get a grip’
The administration says it’s tired of criticism that its messaging is framed around white supremacy or Nazi slogans.
“It seems that the mainstream media has become a meme of their own: The deranged leftist who claims everything they dislike must be Nazi propaganda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “This line of attack is boring and tired. Get a grip.”
Referring to the “We’ll Have Our Home Again” post, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said it “was a reference to 20-plus million illegal aliens invading the country.”
“I don’t know where you guys are getting this stuff,” she added, “but it is absurd.”
César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, said the administration’s references are a choice.
“You don’t have to dip into white supremacist sloganeering to promote immigration regulation,” he said, noting that former President Bill Clinton signed two bills toughening penalties on immigrants who were in the country illegally in the 1990s without doing so.
He added that the administration seems to calibrate its references.
“The imagery is not simply a reproduction of common white supremacist imagery or text, but a play on that imagery — and that gives them the breathing room they want,” Garcia Hernández said.
Trump won his second term with robust support from Latino voters and increased his backing among both Black and Asian voters, all while running on pledges of tough border enforcement and mass deportations.
Still, Trump for years has created enthusiasm among white supremacist groups, who see his nationalist and anti-immigrant stance as validating their own.
The president has complained that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and spoken favorably about white immigrants compared to other immigrants. In his first term, he bemoaned the number of immigrants coming from what he called "shithole countries" such as Haiti or ones in Africa, while wondering why the U.S. doesn't draw more people from Norway. Last month, he called Somali immigrants "garbage."
Trump changed immigration policy to favor whites in one area by shutting down the admission of refugees except for white South Africans, whom he contends, against evidence, are being discriminated against in their home country.
Online appeal for the far right
Some of Trump’s most prominent supporters have openly embraced the cause of white nationalists.
Elon Musk, who was Trump's biggest donor during the 2024 presidential campaign and ran the president's Department of Government Efficiency for the first part of last year, recirculated a user post on X, the social platform he owns, that called for "white solidarity" to prevent the mass murder of white men and added a "100" emoji indicating agreement.
The administration’s history has led to claims that it’s using white supremacist language even when there is no evidence for it.
In the aftermath of the Good shooting in Minnesota, a sign that appeared on Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem's lectern during a news conference — reading "One Of Ours, All Of Yours" — drew widespread attention on social media, with many commentators suggesting it was a Nazi phrase. The Southern Poverty Law Center, however, could not trace the words to any Nazi slogan.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, said it was a reference to the subject of the press conference: “a CBP officer who was shot — he was one of our officers and all of the country’s federal law enforcement officer,” she wrote in an email.
Hannah Gais, a senior researcher with the SPLC, has long tracked white supremacist groups and said she thinks the administration knows what it’s doing with its messaging slogans.
“They know their base is this overly online right-winger who they know will go nuts if they say ‘Which Way, Western Man?’” Gais said. “I don’t think it’s a tenable strategy for the long term because the stuff is incomprehensible to most people. And if it is comprehensible, people don’t like it.”
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