Donald Trump and maga Republicans push illegal Nazi Gestapo tactics without shame or consequences

Echo opinion published in Yahoo.com and Huffington Post by Nathalie Baptiste:

When Donald Trump campaigned for president, he made scores of crazy empty promises to the American people — but he’s only kept one.

In 2024, political pundits and operatives saw affordability as the key issue of the presidential campaign. Trump certainly played it up: On the campaign trail, he pledged that he would bring down inflation and make groceries cheaper again, and when he won, observers credited that strategy for his victory.

One year into his second term, his approval numbers are in the tank, and inflation persists.

But that’s because Donald Trump's real campaign promise wasn’t about the economy. Instead, it was all about racism.

He spouted dehumanizing lies about immigrants, dabbled in eugenics and pledged to conduct mass deportations. “When I win on November 5, the migrant invasion ends, and the restoration of our country begins,” Trump said at a rally in October 2024.

When he got back to the White House, he immediately began delivering on both the explicit promises and the tacit (implied) implications. 

In the last year, Trump has deported immigrants without so much as a trial, defunded government programs dedicated to diversity and inclusion, and deployed thousands of federal agents to blue cities to wreak havoc on people of color and their allies.

"This is the government weaponizing the social and political views of the president,” William Roberts, the senior vice president for rights and justice at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that promotes liberal policies, told HuffPost.

“It’s not just ‘Donald Trump is a racist,’” Roberts said. “It’s Trump’s government engaging in policy-making to harm certain people.”

Donald Trump's real campaign promise wasn’t about the economy. Instead, it was all about racism. Illustration: HuffPost; Photos: Getty

There has been a clear through-line between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the worst excesses of his second term: During the 2024 presidential campaign, a viral claim about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — where approximately 10,000 Haitians had arrived in recent years — also caught Trump’s attention. He repeated the racist rumor during a presidential debate with his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Trump’s running mate, (Hillbilly and former Marine Corporal) JD Vance, repeated the rumor, plus added claims of his own, including saying Haitians were bringing diseases to Ohio.

But, wait❗ Hillbilly Vance also essentially admitted that he was lying.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said in a September 2024, interview with CNN.

Suddenly, Haitian immigrants across the U.S. were targets. Springfield, Ohio, school children were subjected to bomb threats, and in small towns in Pennsylvania and Alabama with significant Haitian populations, residents worried for their safety.

The fact that Trump faced no consequences and instead was rewarded with another shot at the presidency has enabled even more blatant lies about marginalized, often immigrant, populations — with deadly results.

n December 2025, a viral video alleging fraud at Somali-run day cares in the Minneapolis area caught the attention of the Trump administration. Nick Shirley, the right-wing agitator who made the video, claimed that he had uncovered $100 million worth of fraud. (Minnesota officials investigated his claims and, during surprise inspections, found that all the day cares featured in his videos were operating as expected.) But still, Trump sent federal officers to “investigate.”

Before the surge of federal agents into Minnesota, Trump was referring to Somalis, including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), as “garbage.”

“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” he saidat a Cabinet meeting last November.

But as president, Trump doesn’t merely have to pay lip service to racist internet rumors. He is illegally using the  the full force of the federal government.

The Department of Homeland Security deployed thousands of immigration agents to Minneapolis, which has the largest Somali population in the U.S. Just two days into what DHS referred to as its largest immigration operation ever, 37-year-old 💙Renee Good, 😥a white mother of three who appeared to be engaging in protest, was shot and killed by Jonathan Ross, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, while sitting in her car.

She was only the latest person to be shot by federal officers — joining people like Kevin Porter, who was fatally shot in Los Angeles, and Marimar Martinez, who survived a shooting in Chicago — but her death sparked widespread protests in Minneapolis and beyond.

Evil  ICE doubled down after Ms. Good was killed. Federal agents are seen all over Minneapolis, targeting ordinary people, dragging them from their cars and using pepper spray and other chemical irritants. The city’s public school system shut down for two days and is now offering remote learning for any families who are too fearful to send their children to school.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the largely Somali neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside in Minneapolis on December. 9, 2025. AP Photo/Mark Vancleave

Moreover, the government does not make any secret of the philosophy behind the crackdown. The official X/ account of the Department of Homeland Security regularly posts memes and songs popular with white nationalists and Nazis.

“Calling everything you dislike ‘Nazi propaganda’ (how about "gestapo tactics", does that work❓) is tiresome,” a DHS spokesperson told HuffPost in an emailed statement. “DHS will continue to use all tools to communicate with the American people and keep them informed on the illegal historic effort to Make America Safe Again.”

“The administration wants this country to be more white,” Seth Levi, the chief strategy officer at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told HuffPost. “These are white nationalist beliefs that we’ve seen in the fringes going back decades but it’s becoming mainstream thought by the administration.”

In Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Charlotte, immigrant communities and their allies have also been subjected to an unprecedented blitz, all previewed by Trump on the campaign trail.

In 2024, Trump said that Aurora, Colorado, a Denver suburb, was a “war zone” being run by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuela-based criminal organization. But even Republican officials in the city said that the claims were false and that Aurora was safe for families.

“It’s like an invasion from within, and we’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country,” Trump said in September of that year. “And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.”

Trump continued on with the fiction in his second term by targeting Latino men across the country and accusing them of being gang members, even if the evidence was thin. In March, the Department of Homeland Security sent hundreds of mostly Venezuelan men to a prison in El Salvador known for its human rights abuses. The men had not received trials or sentences, and many had no criminal records. 

When advocates filed a lawsuit accusing immigration officers of illegally targeting people based on their race, the Supreme Court — where a full one-third of the justices have been appointed by Trump — ruled 6-3 to allow it. 

Ethnicity, wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in his opinion, “can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors.”

Imprisoned men crowded into a cell look on as Department of Homeland Security Secretary "Evil ICEQueen" Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) on March 26, 2025, in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Photo by Alex Brandon-Pool/Getty ImagesMore

Beyond the violence that Trump has the power to enable as president, there are trickle-down effects.😓😒

“It does create a permission structure to say these things out in the open,” Levi said. “These aren’t new feelings or beliefs, but people used to recognize them as taboo and kept them to themselves.”

There’s evidence that racist rhetoric from the upper echelons of government can influence the average American as well. Hateful and bigoted rhetoric online increased after the 2024 election, and a December 2025 Gallup poll found that most Americans believe that political rhetoric has gone too far.

As Trump ramps up his deportation efforts, everyday people are trying to aid him. There have been multipleinstances of people publiclyhelping deportation officers, including by directing them toward immigrants.

“Jim Crow wasn’t held up only with policy but also by regular people,” Roberts said, referring to the set of racially discriminatory laws, violence and social structures that oppressed Black people in the U.S. South for nearly 100 years after the abolition of slavery.

In many ways, it may be too late to put this genie back in the bottle. Immigration enforcement is only the most visible and most recent manifestation of the administration’s agenda.

During his first days in office, Trump signed an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal government. The administration quickly went to work to fire employees who did diversity work and dismantle programs that didn’t align with their worldview.

Although the executive order didn’t apply to private companies, leaders in the sector followed suit and began pulling back from their DEI pledges as well.

The assault on the government dealt an especially big blow to Black workers, who are overrepresented as federal employees because public sector jobs have been traditionally more welcoming to people of color.

Trump also signed orders that dismantled DEI in K-12 public schools and higher education institutes, while demanding elite colleges turn over their race and admissions data. The administration has been using allegations of antisemitism or claims race is being illegally used as an admissions factor to pressure schools into favoring a more right-wing agenda, even as it puts similar pressures on students themselves. Thousands of international students have lost their ability to study in the U.S.

And DHS officials began targeting college students with opinions it didn’t like, including Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestinian protests on campus and was arrested over his beliefs last March.

It’s all happening with at least the excuse, if not genuine belief, that Trump has a mandate from the people. He made it very clear throughout his campaign that mass deportations, demonizing the other and accepting bigotry would dominate his second term.

This is what they voted for. And that is what has happened.

“It’s really emboldening people to treat folks however they want to,” Roberts said. “[His policies] will resurrect a lot of the racial animus that has always lived in America.”

Despite his lofty promises about the economy, affordable groceries and ushering in a new golden age, there appears to be only one true constant of the Trump administration.

“People sometimes have a tendency to overthink and overanalyze because we don’t want to accept the most obvious explanation that’s right in front of us,” Levi said.

“But when the administration is tweeting out Nazi memes and songs, I don’t believe for a second that there’s a nuanced hot take on that,” he continued. “They’re being pretty clear about what their Nazi Gestapo beliefs are.”