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From the start, the agenda of MAGA, as developed by demagogue Donald Trump, was to provide a big tent for all forms of racism. This was one of its superpowers. MAGA made room for Southern racists full of nostalgia for the Jim Crow South; people who distrust or feel hostile to anyone who is not White and Christian; neo-Nazis; and far-right extremists linked to Russia, Hungary, and other present-day autocracies. MAGA brought global and home-grown hatreds together and gave them a political home.
This big tent of racism is why the noose and the swastika share space as objects to be rehabilitated during Trump’s second presidency. The U.S. Coast Guard singled them out in announcing change to a policy that had associated them with “oppression or hatred.” Instead, the noose and the swastika would now be labelled as only “potentially divisive,” and their display classified as “a potential hate incident.”
The word “potential” does the normalization work here. It suggests that some people don’t have a problem with swastikas or nooses and don’t find them hateful. Maybe they have positive feelings about Nazis and their quest to create a Jew-free world, or see Blacks as undeserving of rights: if Blacks were lynched, they must have had it coming to them. Calling nooses and swastikas divisive and hateful does not respect these racist beliefs.
In the upside-down world of authoritarianism, condemning nooses and swastikas is downright discriminatory.
Outrage among the public and Democratic lawmakers caused the Coast Guard to backpedal. The revised policy now states that “[d]ivisive or hate symbols and flags are prohibited,” and specifies that this includes “a noose, a swastika, and any symbols or flags co-opted or adopted by hate-based groups.”
We should not be surprised that a U.S. government entity was attempting to make nooses and swastikas more acceptable. Each expression of racism has its own history in America, but in 2025 they come together to advance the goal of creating an American ethno-state supported by ideologies of White supremacy and Christian nationalism—a state in which racialized voter suppression, mass detention and deportation, and Fascist-style population engineering schemes reshape American governance and society.
Government officials who bring the noose and the swastika to our attention participate in this shift, as do propagandists who tell us that racist violence against multiple targets may be necessary to save the nation and White Christian “civilization.
The big tent of racism is also why anti-Black and pro-Nazi sentiments were represented in the Telegram group chats among young GOP functionaries that Politico published.
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All of these individuals take their cues from a leader who has made violence his brand, including by inciting a violent mob to overthrow the government; partnering with murderous autocrats and dismissing the butchering of a journalist by one of them with the comment “things happen”; and advocating for the execution of members of the political opposition.
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Normalizing the Noose
Our focus may be drawn these days to anti-immigrant hatred due to the brutal and intense raids and disappearances of people by ICE agents, but the normalization of the noose is in sync with an ongoing war on Blacks in America. The crusade against DEI in schools and workplaces is part of a larger coordinated effort to erase “Black history and Black futures.” This entails targeting Black institutions, removing Blacks from positions of prestige and leadership in the military and other areas of government, and rewriting American history to marginalize or erase Black contributions while also suppressing knowledge of slavery and myriad forms of anti-Black violence.
The war on Blacks has always been at the heart of the project of destroying America as a multi-racial democracy. In a November 2016 CNN essay, I warned Americans about the danger of White nationalism and the intention to “turn back the clock” to stop the further spread of Black power in the wake of the Barack Obama presidency.
The January 6 coup attempt was not just about keeping Trump in office, but also about keeping Kamala Harris, who embodies in her person America as a multi-faith and multi-racial national community, out of power. The noose and gallows erected at the Capitol that day were directed at “traitors, so they know the stakes,” –lawmakers of any race and party who interfered with Trump’s right to stay in the White House—but they also demonstrated allegiance to a history of racist violence in America and a view of violence as the way to advance history.
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Normalizing Nazism
Violence was central to the original Fascists, and it is central to the authoritarians who have followed them. Violence is the way you bring change to societies; the way you solve differences; and the way you prove your worth in the national community. As the most recognizable emblem of the Nazi community, the swastika became shorthand for these beliefs.
In 2024, Trump had released a campaign video asserting that “the creation of a unified Reich” would be one of his achievements if he returned to office, so this administration’s efforts to normalize aspects of Nazism are on brand. They have platformed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, performed apparent Nazi salutes in public (Elon Musk and Steven Bannon made their gestures at MAGA events, to give the salutes an official imprimatur). Border Patrol official Greg Bovino brought his theatrical version of the gesture to the streets, along with his Gestapo-like apparel. How could the swastika not have its own MAGA revival?
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Only MAGA Can Talk about Nazis
Authoritarians believe that they have the right to control the media discourse on this and any other subject. Critics who point out or call out these appropriations of Fascist language and tactics must be vilified and threatened in various ways. To that end, the Trump administration has attempted to revive its 2022 defamation lawsuit against CNN. As reported in Deadline, the suit for $475 million objected to CNN commentators using the “Big Lie” term to describe Trump’s claims about the 2020 election because they created “a false and incendiary association” between him and Adolf Hitler’s propaganda operations.
I followed this lawsuit closely because my Jan. 25, 2021 CNN op-ed was quoted in the lawsuit,. It argued that Trump followers who participated in the January 6 insurrection had been primed to believe the “Big Lie” by the thousands of smaller lies Trump told since 2016 about the corruption of American elections.
As I wrote:
A leader’s Big Lie has no power and makes little sense on its own. It has traction only if the public has been fed many, many smaller lies. It relies on a larger network of falsehoods told by the leader and reinforced by his government officials and compliant media. The Big Lie works because it is part of an established alternate belief system – an edifice of lies, assembled piece by piece.
The lawsuit was dismissed in 2023 by Trump-appointed U.S. District judge Raag Singhal, who ruled that the use of such references was a matter of opinion, not fact. Now a panel of judges on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the suit was “meritless,” ending the attempt to keep it alive.
This setback for MAGA is heartening, but we must remain attentive to the ways each Nazi salute, each recall to the history of lynching, and each act of publicly performed racist violence by ICE agents contribute to the acceptance and normalization of authoritarian tactics. Bannon was given a platform by 60 Minutes and The Economist after his Nazi salute –as if that salute did not matter.
Let us resist that kind of normalization by responding to every evocation of the noose and the swastika with acts of anti-racist education and assistance to those who are targeted today. In doing so, we continue the work of the brave civil rights and anti-Fascist resisters who opposed authoritarian violence in America and abroad.
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