The social media feeds of the Trump administration, and in particular those that relate to immigration, have been marked by their belligerence, high-production values and, sometimes, cruelty. One of the best/worst examples came last year when the Department of Homeland Security posted a film of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem visiting El Salvador’s notorious CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center) where Venezuelans who the Trump administration claimed were gang members and violent criminals were being detained.
@nypost US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived in El Salvador Wednesday to tour the notoriously hellish prison housing alleged gang me... See more
But the DHS and other departments have, more recently, come under fire for what critics describe as a series of social media posts that deliberately amplify white nationalist memes. But the shift didn't happen overnight. It began to appear last summer, with federal accounts using idealised Americana imagery – frontier paintings, classical monuments, and pastoral scenes that hark back to a very specific version of the American past (ie, a white, segregated one).
Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington university, told NBC News last week, “These are no longer dog whistles. They’re bullhorns.”
Here, we look at how the Trump administration’s social media feed has started to say the quiet parts out loud.
1. ‘We’ll Have Our Home Again’
On 9 January - two days after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent (ICE) - the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, posted an image on X and Instagram of a cowboy riding a horse with snowcapped mountains in the background. A military plane flies overhead and the title reads": ‘We’ll have our home again.’
The Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLC), a non-profit advocacy organization that monitors domestic hate groups and extremist organisations across the United States (and whose work is frequently cited by media organisations), explained that “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” is the title of a song attributed to an a cappella group called the Pine Tree Riots affiliated with the Mannerbund, which the centre had listed as a white nationalist group. “The Mannerbund — named after the German word Männerbund, meaning an ‘alliance of men’ — is a self-described ‘fraternity for right-wing men’ or ‘pro-White fraternal order’.”
SPLC says that since the song’s release in 2020, it has been claimed by various far-right groups, including the Proud Boys, and sung at their rallies.
The Intercept noted that lyrics from We’ll Have Our Home Again provided the opening for the “manifesto” of Ryan Christopher Palmeter, a 21-year-old who killed three Black people in Florida, in 2023.
2. ‘One Homeland. One People. One Heritage’
A day later, January 10, the Department of Labor posted on X "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American." The post includes a 10-second video featuring George Washington and assorted propaganda posters from World War I and II.
Multiple media outlets pointed out the similarities between the Labor department’s post and a common slogan used by the Nazi Party, “One People, One Country, One Leader”. Headlines ranged from The Trump administration can’t stop winking at white nationalists (Vox) to "Labor Department accused of echoing Nazi slogan in social media post.” (CNBC).
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” translates to “One People, One Country, One Leader” and was “one of the central slogans used by Hitler and the Nazi Party.”
The Free Press, the media company founded in 2021 by former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and her wife Nellie Bowles, which often challenges mainstream media orthodoxy, fell in line with many orthodox outlets on this occasion. Bowles, writing days after the X post, said, “Our government social media accounts are posting content that I can describe only as playing footsie with old Nazi slogans. Actually, at this point we could call it dry humping.”
3. ‘Protect the homeland’
This style of meme from the DHS is not new. It took root last summer. One of the first in the genre was posted on X on 1 July, a painting titled Morning Pledge by Thomas Kinkade with the headline “Protect the Homeland”.
Unfortunately for the DHS, they had not consulted the Kinkade family foundation (the artist died in 2012). The foundation released a statement: “Like many of you, we were deeply troubled to see this image used to promote division and xenophobia associated with the ideals of DHS, as this is antithetical to our mission.”
The word homeland was a word favoured by the Nazis. Heimat (though not as direct translation) referred to an emotional connection to the land, to the place where you belong. Though not all belonged.
Historian and author Peter Blickle, in Heimat: A German Dream, explains how the Nazis took the sense of belonging and turned it into a racial construct. "The Nazis nationalised and racialised the concept of Heimat. It was no longer a place of individual memory, but a place of collective, biological belonging. By defining who belonged to the Heimat, they simultaneously defined who was 'heimatlos' (homeless) and therefore a threat to the nation."
Blickle argues that the Nazi Heimat was an "innocent" space – a landscape of forests and mountains that was pure. To maintain that innocence, anything foreign or polluting (people, ideas, or architecture) had to be removed.
4. Remember Your Homeland’s Heritage
On July 14, the DHS posted an image on X entitled “Remember Your Homeland’s Heritage. New Life in a New Land”, alongside a painting by Morgan Weistling. In this reading, immigrants seem to have the DHS’s blessing, as it denotes likely settlers in the New World. The correct title of the painting is A Prayer for a New Life. Weistling posed on X to say he had never granted permission to the DHS for its use.
Adam Klein, associate professor at Pace University, and a student of extremist movements, told the Guardian: “The [Weistling] painting isn’t violent at all. On the surface, it’s a beautiful image. But when you look at where it’s coming from, with [DHS using] language like ‘homeland’ and ‘heritage’, that’s really evocative of anti-immigrant sentiment.”
Almost immediately under the DHS post, a poster called @cturnbull1968 observes that, in relation to the scene depicted, it’s likely that: “A few minutes later, an ICE wagon pulls up next to them, agents cuff and stuff them into the back and then summarily send them back to Ireland.”
5. A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending
In which the DHS, on 23 July 2025, posted an image of a painting, American Progress, by John Gast.
Heather Cox Richardson, in an analysis published on her Substack, says that the Department of Homeland Security’s use of 19th-century frontier imagery signals a shift toward a "blood and soil" ideology. Cox says the administration’s rhetoric focuses on an exclusionary, ancestry-based nationalism that mirrors the propaganda of 1930s Germany.
Referring to both of these posts in July, Richardson says, “Just as in the words in the post about John Gast’s painting, the two Hs are capitalised, evoking “HH,” accepted in right-wing circles as a way to write “Heil Hitler.”
Others pointed out that the DHS post contained exactly 14 words which, as the ADL explains, “14 Words" is a reference to the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."
On X, directly beneath the DHS post, a poster asks: “@grok. What are the chances that it’s purely coincidence that this tweet from DHS contains exactly 14 words, two capitals H’s (HH, as in Heil Hitler), A and D capitalized (A=1st letter, D=4th letter for 14 again), and alongside a painting showing white settlement in Native land?”
Grok replies: “The alignment of exactly 14 words, HH capitalization (echoing ‘88’ for Heil Hitler), A/D numerology (1/4=14), and a painting symbolizing white colonial expansion over Native lands mirrors known white supremacist dogwhistles like the ‘14 Words’ slogan. DHS has denied similar past accusations as coincidences, but the precision here makes pure chance unlikely—I'd estimate under 30% probability. Scrutiny is warranted.”
6. Which way, American man?
In August, the DHS, in a recruitment post on X used a phrase, “Which way, American man?“, that mirrors the title of a book which has become popular in far right circles.
Extremist watchdog groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti Defamation League have long identified the 1978 book Which Way, Western Man? by William Gayley Simpson as the “bible” of the white nationalist movement – a 700-page ideological manual that transitions readers from traditional values toward a radical, Nietzschean vision of racial hierarchy.
Robert Futrell, a professor who studies far-right extremism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas told NBC, “I think connecting the phrasing of ‘Which way American man,’ especially paired with the ideas of cultural decline, the ideas of invasion, the idea of homeland, it’s connecting the phrasing to a white supremacist canon.”
At the time of the post DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement: “Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ is tiresome. Uncle Sam, who represent America, is at a crossroads, pondering which way America should go.”
7. We Can Return
The direction of travel, according to another post on X in August, seems to be travelling back in time. Specifically, in this case, to Washington DC in 1943. DC, like many other major cities at that time, was rigidly segregated – the public school system, theatres, hotels and restaurants enforced strict segregation.
A landmark 1948 report, Segregation in Washington: a Report of the National Committee on Segregation in the Nation's Capital opens with these words: "The Capital of the world's greatest democracy is a segregated city. It is a city of 'iron curtains' which bar the Negro from the rights and privileges of citizenship."
Last weekend, Mark Davis, an independent Florida congressional candidate who describes himself as a “conservative dad”, bought the domain name nazis.us in response to the US government “going full fascist”. Davis has arranged that visitors to nazis.us are automatically redirected to the US Department of Homeland Security.
John Mulholland is a former editor of the Observer and of Guardian US. He is now managing editor, California, at State Affairs and an advisor on the Nerve