The U.S. Labor Department is embracing Nazi slogans and tropes, the Pentagon’s research office is deploying neo-Nazi graphic elements in its social-media feeds, and the Department of Homeland Security recently posted lyrics mimicking a popular song by a band with ties to an ethno-nationalist social club.
The official social-media channels of the Trump administration have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery.

After several marathon sessions in Room 101 of the Ministry of Trump, the Republican member of Congress was beginning to see the strategic necessity of destroying NATO to add Greenland to the United States. It still came only in flashes. The Republican was strapped to a camp bed surrounded with dials, trying quickly to get his mind right so that he could go back out there and do media and answer the questions about Greenland correctly. He was perspiring heavily, as was his interrogator, O’Brien.

President Trump prosecutes his political opponents; deports immigrants, including some here legally, to foreign prisons without due process; solicits tribute payments from corporations and foreign governments; deploys soldiers to American cities that are not, in fact, in civil-war-level chaos; and puts his name and image on government buildings that quite obviously don’t belong to him.

Updated with new questions at 3:50 p.m. ET on January 21, 2026.
In Princeton, New Jersey, a short stroll from the university you have heard of, there lies a little campus home to the Institute for Advanced Study. It was founded in 1930 not to confer degrees nor—God forbid!—to make money, nor even to conduct research toward any end in particular. The institute proclaims that its purpose is “the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.

A Russian proverb I heard growing up translates to something like “Those who recall the past will lose an eye.” Dwelling on bygone events, it suggests, is dangerous. My family of post-Soviet refugees seemed to believe it, and mostly passed down their history in loose, cinematic anecdotes. I’d piece together what their lives were like before we immigrated to Los Angeles from images of barbed-wire obstacle courses, ransacked apartments, and sudden deaths.