An onlooker holds a sign that reads "shame" as members of law enforcement work the scene following a suspected shooting by an ICE agent during federal law enforcement operations on January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis. | Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesProgressives have long argued that Donald Trump’s immigration agenda is a fundamentally fascistic enterprise. In their telling, the president’s goal is not merely to enforce America’s borders but to purify its blood — and unleash state violence against anyone who resists his campaign of ethnic cleansing.Key takeawaysTrump defended an ICE agent who killed an unarmed protester; most Americans disapprove of that shooting.Federal agencies keep posting thinly veiled allusions to white nationalist and neo-Nazi works and ideas.The administration appears to be prioritizing approval from extremely online reactionaries over mainstream public opinion.Of course, there’s nothing new about the left deriding Republicans as fascists (in 2008, Keith Olbermann advised George W. Bush, “get them to print you a T-shirt with ‘fascist’ on it.”). Traditionally, however, GOP officials have sought to combat that charge. Yet in recent days, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to validate it — rallying to the defense of an ICE agent who shot an unarmed woman dead on video, while disseminating white nationalist propaganda from official government accounts.As communications strategies go, this one is a bit odd. Even if the Trump administration were indeed a fascist regime, it would have little political incentive to advertise its own extremism. America’s electorate is not demanding apologetics for ICE brutality or thinly disguised calls for racial purification. But Trump’s most radicalized followers on X and Truth Social are. And the US government is evidently more concerned with winning the latter’s approval than the former’s. Trump’s politically mindless defense of Renee Nicole Good’s killerLast week in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good to death. By now, you have probably witnessed her final moments; videos of the encounter quickly became ubiquitous on social media. In them, the masked agent — later identified as Jonathan Ross — steps in front of Good’s car while another demands that she exit her vehicle. Good, an anti-ICE protester, responds by trying to drive away. In doing so, she passes close by Ross, possibly bumping him (although he displays no sign of injury in subsequent footage). The ICE officer proceeds to shoot at her three times — twice, when he is standing to the car’s left and therefore faces no conceivable threat from her. He then calls her a “fucking bitch.”The Trump administration could have responded to this by expressing concern or sorrow about Good’s seemingly needless death. Failing that, the president could have declined to take a position on the killing until an investigation was conducted. Either response would have combated the charge that the White House condones apparently extralegal violence in service of its deportation goals. Instead, Trump rushed to Truth Social to condemn Good as “a professional agitator” who had “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.” Vice President JD Vance and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, meanwhile, suggested the ICE agent had merely defended himself against an act of “domestic terrorism.”As an approach to political damage control, all this was bizarre. The administration had little basis for confidence that public opinion would be on the ICE agent’s side; it doesn’t take much imagination to picture the median American disapproving of a law enforcement officer shooting a young mother multiple times through her SUV’s side window. And subsequent polling confirms that most Americans think such violence is actually bad: A YouGov survey taken over the weekend found Americans favoring criminal charges for Ross by a 53 percent to 30 percent margin.The federal government can’t stop posting white nationalist propagandaIn this context, one might think the White House would be bending over backward to make the goals of its immigration policy appear as benign as possible: If you want to persuade voters to accept ICE’s radical methods, you’d presumably want to assure them that it has mainstream objectives. Instead, the administration opted to associate its immigration agenda with a Nazi slogan. Adolf Hitler’s regime famously advertised its rule with the tagline, “One People, One Realm, One Leader.” Three days after Renee Good’s killing, Trump’s Department of Labor tweeted, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.Remember who you are, American. pic.twitter.com/2eh8njcz9Z— U.S. Department of Labor (@USDOL) January 11, 2026This post is, on its face, evocative of white nationalism. The United States is a multiethnic society. To say that it has only “one heritage” is to suggest that only one of its ethnic groups is truly American. But the remarks are even more sinister when the Nazi allusion is taken into account. And this echo is almost certainly not coincidental. Under Trump, the official accounts of federal agencies have repeatedly referenced white nationalist memes and works.On January 9, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted, “We’ll have our home again,” a lyric from an anthem adopted by the neo-fascist group The Proud Boys and other white nationalist organizations. This was accompanied by a link where one could sign up to join ICE.We’ll have our home again.https://t.co/nZkBEj3GGi pic.twitter.com/OVX3fac1xr— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) January 9, 2026Last August, DHS shared an ICE recruitment poster beneath the phrase, “Which way, American man?” — an apparent reference to the white supremacist tract, “Which Way, Western Man?” which argues that “Race consciousness, and discrimination on the basis of race, are absolutely essential to any race’s survival. … That is why the Jews are so fiercely for it for themselves…and fiercely against it for us, because we are their intended victim.”Which way, American man?https://t.co/nZkBEj3GGi pic.twitter.com/Nvz5DlgpKx— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) August 11, 2025In October, the US Border Patrol posted a video on its Facebook page of agents loading guns and driving through the desert, as a 13-second clip of Michael Jackson’s song “They Don’t Care About Us” plays — specifically, the lines “Jew me, sue me, everybody do me, kick me, k*ke me.”Other Trump administration posts have suggested that its immigration policy aims to return the United States to its condition in 1943 (it is hard to see what specifically this could reference beyond the nation’s racial composition at that time) and implored ICE recruits to “Defend your culture!”Meanwhile, last fall, Vance refused to condemn a group of Republican activists who had praised Hitler and disparaged Black people as “monkeys” in their private group chat.The government is too online (and/or fascist)All this raises the question: Why is the administration choosing to be so openly fascistic?When Trump came to office, his plans for mass deportation enjoyed considerable public support. The administration could have tried to safeguard this mandate by insisting that ICE uphold high standards of conduct and pursue broadly supported objectives: to remove undocumented criminals from the country and establish a greater deterrent against unauthorized migration. Instead, it has chosen to defend ICE agents brutalizing — and, in one case, killing — US citizens while relentlessly winking at neo-Nazis from official government accounts. Public support for both ICE and Trump’s immigration agenda has (predictably) declined as a result. The simplest explanation for the administration’s actions is that it is full of authoritarian white nationalists, who see propagandizing for a more racially pure United States — and empowering ICE to brutalize its enemies — as sacred missions. The political costs of these endeavors may seem negligible, relative to the ideological principles at stake. And this is surely part of the story. Yet we know that the Trump administration is capable of strategic communication. The White House is committed to cutting health insurance benefits for poor people to finance tax cuts for the wealthy. But it does not typically advertise that fiscal commitment, presumably because it recognizes its objectives are deeply unpopular. Why then has it been wearing its white nationalism on its sleeve (or, more precisely, its DHS’s X account)? I suspect that the answer is, in part, that our leaders are extremely online. Trump and Vance are prolific social media users. Judging by the frequency and length of their posts, each spends a large share of their waking hours scrolling through X and Truth Social.Meanwhile, the younger conservatives who staff federal agencies’ social media teams are likely even more fully immersed in the right’s online community. And that community is bound less by its passion for supply-side tax cuts than for white racial grievance. Once brought together by such resentments, extremely online reactionaries are liable to radicalize each other. This is due in part to a phenomenon that social scientists call “group polarization”: When people who all broadly agree on a subject discuss it together, they tend to gravitate towards more and more extreme versions of their pre-existing position. Studies first documented this tendency in the 1990s. Back then, researchers placed supporters of gun control in a room and had them deliberate on that issue. The subjects quickly became more passionate about restricting firearms. And the same basic pattern held for a wide range of other issues. Algorithmic social media promotes group polarization on an unprecedented scale. Anti-immigration conservatives are perpetually in conversation with each other, digesting an endless profusion of arguments and evidence that reinforces their nativist worldview. At the same time, social media rewards the expression of more extreme points of view — both because these attract greater attention and because they help to establish one’s superlative commitment to the cause: If everyone in your online community supports mass deportation, then merely advocating for that policy will do little to draw notice or demonstrate your ideological purity. Violating taboos that constrain others’ advocacy — such as norms against open racism, antisemitism, or apologetics for ICE brutality — however, are liable to gain one both attention and distinction. For these reasons, among others, the online right has grown increasingly militant in its nativism. It is impossible to know Trump or Vance’s motivations with certainty. But it’s hard to believe that their decision to hastily rally to Ross’s cause was in no way informed by the sentiments of their social media feeds.Likewise, it’s difficult to see why Vance would stick his neck out for a racist Republican group chat if not to cultivate the esteem of his online community. The Homeland Security and Labor Department social media accounts, meanwhile, are transparently catering to the tastes of the far-right fringe rather than those of the median voter. Perhaps, it is for the best that the Trump administration is so preoccupied with pleasing such a narrow slice of the public, as this could undermine it in future elections. For now, though, America is evidently condemned to government of the groypers, by the groypers, and for the groypers.