From Nazi-hugging Greg Bovino to the Supreme Court, the hood is coming off MAGA
As Trump’s popularity hits epic lows, his MAGA movement gets more openly racist and hostile to democracy.
It was only a few months ago that then-U.S. Border Patrol honcho Greg Bovino, the trench-coat-wearing commandant of immigration agents spreading terror through American cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, was shocked, shocked that anyone would dare compare his masked goons to Nazi Germany’s notorious Gestapo.
In the final days before his ouster, after his men had gunned down two citizens in the streets of Minneapolis, Bovino complained that when critics “make the choice to vilify law enforcement, calling law enforcement names like a Gestapo” — uttered in the most German accent possible — “or using the term kidnapping, that is a choice that is made. There are actions and consequences that come from those choices.”
That’s why the choices that Bovino is now making as a private citizen are so revealing.
Last week, Bovino screamed the quiet part out loud with a post on X offering words of support to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other law enforcement officers who’ve been tear-gassing and assaulting protesters outside the ICE-detainee hunger strike at Newark’s Delaney Hall. He deliberately chose to illustrate those words with a picture that catches him in a full-on Nazi salute.
The post came as Bovino was jetting off to Portugal as a star speaker at a summit meeting that spotlighted a rogues’ gallery of some of the world’s worst white supremacists and unabashed Nazi sympathizers on their favored topic of “remigration” — a fancy word for purging all immigrants to restore white European cultural dominance.
Bovino’s words — he called the remigration concept, including his dream of expelling 100 million human beings from the United States, “the most important topic of our lifetimes” — were gross, but the real sewage was the friends he made along the way.
He went out of his way to praise a key organizer of the event, the Austrian white nationalist Martin Sellner, who launched his career at age 17 by vandalizing a Vienna synagogue with a swastika and went on to lead a white-nationalist group called Generation Identity while endorsing a plan to send all immigrants in Germany, including those there legally, to exile in North Africa. Bovino said he’d spoken before with Sellner and that when they finally met last week in Portugal, “we were on the same sheet of music almost immediately.”
Others who were at the Portugal confab to sing the same fascist tune included some American representatives of the Patriot Front hate marchers, the Portuguese white supremacist Afonso Gonçalves, who has made noxious claims about Muslims and women as well as racist false statements about the murder rate of Black Americans, and members of Germany’s extreme-right, anti-immigrant AfD party.
As Bovino made clear with that earlier post on X, he seems to be now fully embracing the notion that he is, in the words of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “Nazi-coded” — the suggestion that so outraged him just a few months ago. He even joked with his admirers in Portugal about his infamous trench coat that looks a 1930s German S.S. uniform and was called out by his critics as “Nazi chic.”
“I’ll make you a deal Europe; we get this remigration underway full-throttle in Europe, I’ll break that trench coat out, and I’ll wear it on European soil,” Bovino said to thunderous applause.
It would be easy to dismiss Bovino’s full-fascist coming-out party as a footnote in the Donald Trump-flavored downward spiral of American democracy. Bovino was, after all, unceremoniously forced out of his Border Patrol perch in a kind of “modified limited hangout” after the Minneapolis murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti turned much of Middle America against mass deportation.
But I’d look deeper. Bovino’s ouster has liberated him to tell you openly about the ugly philosophical bedrock beneath the nightly outrages of day laborers kidnapped off America streets and human beings dying needlessly from suicide or neglect in a gulag archipelago — a humanitarian nightmare an authoritarian government is still perpetrating in our names.
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It has nothing to do with law and order, and everything to do with ethnic cleansing — neo-Nazism wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross. Yes, it is happening here.
And it matters because in the summer of 2026, the hood is coming off — not just for Bovino but for Trump’s MAGA movement that is becoming increasingly unhinged as its leader descends into both epic unpopularity and a muddled cognitive state. There is no longer any pretense of hiding the racism, the misogyny, the graft, or the desperation to abuse every lever of power before their window snaps shut.
It’s impossible to dismiss Bovino as a lone nutjob when you look at the naked power grab by a thoroughly corrupted U.S. Supreme Court, which this week disenfranchised Black voters in Alabama — the very state where the now-gutted 1965 Voting Rights Act was forged by the brutal batons of Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” — in a “shadow docket” ruling that obeyed no legal precedent, just naked ambition.
As the High Court’s 6-3 right-wing majority allowed Alabama to hurriedly eliminate a majority-Black congressional district ahead of November’s election, dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted her colleagues for endorsing a “chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians...Just as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court today doubles down on chaos.”
The Supreme Court, including three Trump appointees, has this year cast aside its longstanding principle not to interfere in elections where voting is poised to begin, or already underway. Is that because the justices — including a couple whose corruption is so brazen that some have righteously called for their impeachment — are just as fearful of a Democratic Congress as is Trump? And who cares if a few Black folks get beaten down. That’s racist realpolitik, not justice.
But it didn’t happen in a vacuum.
Self-proclaimed “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth was also yanking his hood off when he struck every woman candidate, and most of the African American ones, from a list of deservedly qualified candidates for Navy promotion to one-star admiral, putting forward a slate of 22 almost exclusively white men — his latest push for a lily white Pentagon brass that he insists is really a war against “woke.”
The regime is acting as an amen chorus for Bovino’s neo-Nazism when it continues to desperately seek a path to create its $1.776 billion slush fund for Trump allies who’ve faced criminal prosecution, including the insurrectionists of Jan. 6, 2021. How so? Critics have noted it’s an echo of a 1933 German project, the Adolf-Hitler-Spende der deutschen Wirtschaft, that the Fuhrer used as a slush fund to pay off Nazis whose violence got them into legal trouble.
Bovino’s European white supremacist pals must have cheered recently when the White House launched a new website, aliens.gov, that presumably seeks to lure the curious about extraterrestrials but is in fact another xenophobic attack on immigrants, charging “THEY WALK AMONG US” as X-Files music plays in the background.
They are telling us who they really are when they hire a 24-year-old convicted participant in the Jan. 6 rioting for a key position within the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, or when Trump picks a 37-year-old housing-business heir with a scammy past and unquestioned loyalty to the president to be director of national intelligence during a time of war.
Trump’s stunning hire of Bill Pulte — his pit bull for launching baseless mortgage fraud investigations of his political enemies — to replace Tulsi Gabbard in that key intelligence post is the essence of the alarming convergence that threatens America right now.
Pulte is both a terrible candidate for the job — he has zero intelligence experience — and the perfect candidate for what the president seems to have in mind, which is finding someone to invent claims of foreign election interference as an excuse to send in troops or seize voting machines on Nov. 3...or worse.
It all starts to make sense. MAGA knows — partly because of Bovino’s murderous Minneapolis campaign — it can’t win at the ballot box, fair and square. But it also knows the dire consequences when a criminal regime loses power. If full-blown fascism is the only way to cling to the White House, why hide behind a mask, or a white sheet?
That’s why Bovino’s very public embrace of global white supremacy is such a critical warning to the rest of us. It’s way past time to fight fascism on American soil with everything we have, because the hour is getting late. Once you’ve seen the heart and soul of the mass deportation machine throwing off a Hitler salute, you can’t unsee it.
Nor should you.
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