Can the situation in the USA really be compared to the early days of Nazi Germany?

No time? blue News summarizes for you

• Is the criticism that the US administration and ICE in particular are behaving like "Nazis" or the "Gestapo" justified? Here are 3 aspects.
• The aesthetics and slogans: "Remember who you are, American" - 9 examples of controversial posts from official social media channels.
• The tone and the language: Why a Hollywood star compares Donald Trump's Jewish advisor to Joseph Goebbels.
• The all-powerful security agency: Trump is pumping up ICE into a huge security agency that he uses as his private army and leverage against his opponents.

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"Remember who you are" is the slogan of a video released by the US Department of Labor. Founding father George Washington enters the picture from below, a muffled sound booms and scenes flicker in quick succession.

The War of Independence, pioneers, advertisements for war bonds, the American Dream in the form of happy 1950s couples. However, the clip is not from that time, but was published on the Department of Labor's X-Channel on 11 January 2026. It reads: "One home, one people, one heritage - remember who you are, American."

This is close to the Nazi slogan "One people, one Reich, one Führer". Anyone who thinks this is an isolated incident needs to see these other eight examples of dubious social media posts from the Trump administration:

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"Embrace Americanism" sounds a little strange in conjunction with the picture. It gets weird because on January 14, 2026, the US Department of Labor <a target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="https://x.com/USDOL/status/2011229346707423352">wrote</a>: "America is for Americans." This is a motto of the racist Ku Klux Klan and is reminiscent of the Nazi slogan "Deutschland den Deutschen".

Image: Screenshot vom 26. Januar 2026

In October, actor Robert De Niro speaks on MSNBC about Donald Trump's top adviser Stephen Miller. He is something like the Joseph Goebbels of the cabinet. "He's a Nazi. Yes, he is, and he's Jewish - he should be ashamed of himself."

Now, you don't have to put too much stock in what an 82-year-old Hollywood star who hates the incumbent president says about his thought leader on immigration policy. But De Niro is not the only one to draw the comparison between the Nazi propaganda minister and Miller.

This is mainly due to a speech the 40-year-old gave after the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk - and which, thanks to his delivery, is remotely reminiscent of Goebbels' 1943 Sports Palace speech. Although Miller does not ask whether people want "total war", he indulges in similar pathos - and demonizes his opponents.

"The storm whispers to the warrior: 'You cannot withstand my strength. And the warrior whispers back: 'I am the storm,'" Miller tells us. "We are the storm, and our enemies cannot comprehend our strength, our determination, our resolve, our passion."

And, "Our lineage and legacy go back to Athens, Rome, Philadelphia and Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities," Miller says. "[Charlie Kirk's widow] Erika stands on the shoulders of warriors from thousands of years ago." To his opponents, he shouts, "You are nothing! You are malice, you are envy, you are hate, you are nothing!"

Miller's speech is not an aberration. Sometimes Trump and his administration also adopt terms that are signal words in right-wing circles: "The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been clearer: remigration now," the Department of Homeland Security demands on X on November 28, 2025, for example.

The word "remigration" actually comes from social science and refers to people who return to their country of origin after a working life. Right-wing extremists have long since hijacked this term in Europe: they understand it to mean forced deportation. The USA is now following suit.

An X-post from the Department of Labor on 8 January: "Globalism has failed. Americanism will prevail".

Screenshot vom 27. Januar 2026

It is a similar story with the word "globalism", the evil brother of the word "globalization", which criticizes worldwide networking as being driven solely by the market. Right-wing extremists and anti-Semites use the term to incite hatred against "globalists" and "globalist elites".

In the X-Post above, for example, a user cheers on US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who declared at the WEF in Davos that "globalism" has failed. The user also believes in right-wing conspiracy theories: the myth of a global unity government that subjugates all nations and the fable of the "Great Reset", in which nations are mixed up to enable world domination by elites.

While the annual budget of the immigration authority ICE was less than six billion dollars ten years ago, it is now 85 billion dollars thanks to the so-called Big Beautiful Bill, NPR calculates. This is more than all other federal security agencies combined, the report continues, referring to the FBI, CIA, Coast Guard and Co.

Eight billion dollars alone is earmarked for recruiting new ICE agents: 220,000 people applied there last year. As a result, 12,000 new ICE members were added to the existing 10,000 federal agents - partly because of videos like these:

The workforce of 22,000 is to be increased further: How many are to be added this year has not yet been determined, according to "Government Executive". Heidi Beirich from the American Global Project Against Hate and Extremism warns CBC that right-wingers are apparently being deliberately targeted.

For example with the slogan "We'll Have Our Home Again", which is also the title of a song by the band Pine Tree Apples. "It's a song that is only known in white nationalist circles," says Beirich. This is not just a "mistake". "The most dangerous thing about it is that it is likely to attract white racists and other extremists." If these end up at ICE, it will create "a very toxic, very dangerous situation".

The situation is already dangerous, as not only the two civilian deaths in Minneapolis show. It is still questionable whether the training of the new recruits is sufficient. What is certain, however, is that there are racists among those ICE agents. They have apparently left behind warnings in Minnesota from times that were thought to be long gone.

Colorado Public Radio reports that the federal agents put a card behind the windshield wipers of the cars of those they do not encounter: an Ace of Spades. "Spade" was a derogatory term for black people from the 1920s onwards, which the civil rights activist Malcolm X wanted to reinterpret in his poem "My Ace of Spades".

Voces Unidas

What will become of this wild and masked troupe that tours the USA with a right-wing bias while, according to"Wired", sometimes not even their vehicles identify them as federal officials? It is obvious that Trump is using ICE as his personal paramilitary and leverage against democratically governed cities and states, warns the Washington Post.

With ICE, the president has a lot of leeway: he can cause chaos in the homeland of his political opponents, disrupt events of unpopular parties or organizations or even elections - and even incite uprisings through harshness and violence. Adolf Hitler also founded a group for this in 1920: the Sturmabteilung, aka SA.