The NPR Politics Podcast - Federal agencies under Trump have been using white nationalist messages

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Federal government agencies have repeatedly invoked white nationalist language and images in the year since President Trump returned to the White House for his second term. We discuss the intended target of those messages and what effects they have. This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, domestic extremism correspondent Odette Yousef, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Odette Youssef. I cover domestic extremism. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And today on the show, President Trump recently got a lot of attention for posting an overtly racist meme. But researchers who specialize in extremism say it's much bigger than one errant post. There's a pattern of government agencies under Trump using white nationalist messaging. Odette, you have been reporting on this. And I'm hoping. that you can just start out by describing some of these messages and images coming from federal agencies so we can get a sense of what we're talking about here. Sure. Yeah. So I'm going to point out just a few of the real top line examples that have happened in the last year, but this is just

tip of the iceberg. So in August, the Department of Homeland Security posted an image to a couple of social media accounts showing an image of Uncle Sam under the words, America needs you, join ice now. But the caption on that post read which way American man. Now, to most people, I don't think that would signal much at all. Right. Like, if I hadn't read your story, that just that doesn't mean anything to me. Exactly. Yeah. But, you know, to people who are familiar with the literature, the aesthetics, the music of the white nationalist movement, that caption was taken as a call back to a 20th century book that has the title, which way Western man.

It is an anti-Semitic racist book that's largely popular within neo-Nazi circles, Tamara. So, you know, there's one example. Another notable example from DHS again was posted just last month. This was an image with the caption, We'll Have Our Home Again. And on Instagram, the post also, included an excerpt from a song by that title, that song and the group behind it are largely known and circulated within the white nationalist channels.

And I'll give you one final example. This one from the Department of Labor, actually. This was just last month. They posted something that had the caption, One homeland, one people, one heritage, remember who you are American. And that struck some as troublingly similar to not,

Germany propaganda that translates to one people, one nation, one leader. So these are just a few examples, but, you know, it's been a year of just seeing image after image, a post after post that are sort of eerily familiar to things that, you know, I've seen that other researchers have seen in the world of white nationalism. Well, Odette, would they say one heritage? What heritage are they referring to? I mean, a lot of the imagery that is posted features sort of like nostalgic paintings, for example, sort of Norman, Rockwellian images of an America past, presumably what they're saying in America lost, that overwhelmingly features white people. You've mentioned several cases. How widespread is this? To me, you know, it seems at this point quite clear that this is a part of

the machinery that is pumping out public messaging from federal agencies. And it's not actually even just the messaging. This is getting woven into federal policy too. You'll remember we've talked on this podcast before about how DHS and the State Department have embraced a concept called remigration, basically encouraging immigrants to self-deport.

Remigration is a term that was popularized by white nationalists, in Europe and wasn't largely known in the U.S. until this administration started promoting it. And now the State Department has an office of remigration. You know, it's also been woven into how some of our federal officials are speaking. Christy Noam visited the Chicago area last summer, and she was speaking to reporters, and she said this phrase, she said, this country was built by citizens. And that just sent alarm bells blaring in my head, because it's,

It's so closely resembled what we often hear within the white nationalist movement, white men built this country or white people built this country, kind of a blood and soil type of framing around who belongs here. So, Odette, the administration is posting a whole bunch of things. Why does it matter? And what do experts who specialize in this say it means? This is definitely very affirming to people that have long been circulating these kinds of images. and language within their fringe groups. But, you know, it's also been clear to other people that have been tracking that kind of thing.

One of the people that I spoke to is Eric Ward. He runs a civil rights organization called Race Forward. If this were just one racist image or one bad post, it wouldn't matter much. What matters is that over the last year, the Trump administration, abusing federal authority and the federal government has increasingly learned to speak in the emotional language of white nationalism, invasion, the anti-Semitic great replacement theory,

homeland under siege, and once a government starts talking that way, it quietly changes who the country is for. Yeah, you know, Ward is talking about something that has a lot of political layers. It started in the first term. Trump famously said there were good people on both sides when he was talking about the neo-Nazi march in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, you know, went on from there telling the proud boys to stand back and stand by. And then in the second term, it becomes official U.S. policy, cultural erasure, you know, talking about Western civilization under siege. It's foreign policy and domestic policy. It's what people like J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio tell Europeans, they've got too many immigrants and they're going to ruin their culture, or it's the way that they recruit for ICE. They're not talking so much about finding criminals. They're talking about defending the homeland from an invasion. That's much, much broader. Yeah, and that obviously is language that President Trump uses on the campaign trail. Yes. Yes. Uses all the time. But now it's embedded. It's embedded. It's embedded in the national security strategy. It's embedded in the speeches that the Secretary of State gives.

I mean, this is now much, much bigger than just an ICE recruitment strategy. It struck me when reading your reporting that you referred to this messaging as propaganda. That is a very specific word. And I'm hoping you can explain why you chose that word and what it means. You know, by definition, propaganda is information that's biased or misleading. And that is a definition that very much applies. to what these federal agencies are doing. You know, take the example I raised earlier,

you know, Christy Noem saying, citizens built this country. You know, I think descendants of slaves would very much have a counterclaim to that or any of the Chinese laborers on the U.S. railway or, you know, countless other examples. It's just not factual. You know, today we're seeing so much messaging

that is attempting to link the idea of immigrants to the idea of criminality, even though data have, shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes in the U.S. than native-born. You know, Eric Ward helped me understand a little bit about the purpose of using this propaganda. Here's what he said. Propaganda doesn't change minds. It trains reflexes. Donald Trump is signaling because he wants to normalize this type of rhetoric, both within MAGA,

but he also wants the American public to become more accustomed. It is a way of testing normalization and tolerance in the larger American society. And so, you know, what Ward told me is that these messages are really intended to create emotional responses in people to certain things. So to feel pride when you hear the word homeland, to have a certain visual association with a homeland, like we were talking, Mara, which mostly involves white. people to prompt fear of, quote, criminal aliens. And creating those emotional associations is a political strategy of manipulation. Well, and certainly, Mara, it is the White House strategy to describe anyone who is in the country illegally as a criminal at this point. The policy of the United States is mass deportation. That's right. And it started out with something that the majority of Americans

actually supported, which was deporting people who had committed crimes. And it morphed into something much, much bigger. It's an anti-immigrant policy that doesn't even stop at deportation. It's trying to convince people to remigrate. That means people maybe who have become naturalized citizens. Donald Trump has suggested at times that he would try to deport what he calls the homegrown. And there is a push to denaturalize people who have become a majorized. American citizens. The thing that's so interesting about this is this is happening at a time when the United States is fast becoming a majority minority population. In other words, white people are going to be in the minority, probably somewhere about 2040. All right. We are going to take a quick

break and we'll have more in a moment. And we're back. And we're talking about Trump administration messaging that includes white nationalist themes. Odette, you talked about how some of this is coded, Like, people wouldn't necessarily know it if they didn't know what they were looking for. What is the Trump administration telling you about these accusations? Well, I'll read some of the statements that they sent me. Here's some of what the Department of Homeland Security responded. Quote, by NPR's standards, every American who posts patriotic imagery on the 4th of July should be canceled and labeled a Nazi. Not everything you dislike is, quote, Nazi propaganda.

I also reached out to the White House more specifically about the Trump administration's use of, you know, this claim that Democrats have been bringing non-citizens into the country to vote illegally. You know, this is a conspiracy theory that has not been backed by evidence that very much resembles what's known as the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which is an anti-Semitic racist conspiracy theory that was born in Europe. among white nationalists there. So the White House responded, quote, there is nothing racist about wanting to ensure only American citizens vote in American elections. NPR's bizarre attack on election integrity is an insult to all Americans and a prime example of why their propaganda is no longer funded by taxpayers. Well, it's also a pretty good preview of one of the big messages that they're using to try to dissuade people from voting in the 2026 elections and perhaps lay the groundwork for challenges. some votes of people who did vote. In other words, they're saying that Democrats are bringing undocumented immigrants into the United States in order to vote illegally in elections. There is next to no evidence of this happening. The thing about the anti-immigrant rhetoric, it's like a Swiss Army knife. It's useful for almost everything that the administration wants to do,

foreign policy, domestic policy, undermining faith in American elections. It's all pervasive. Odette, I do want to ask you, do you have a sense of what the administration's goals are here or who they want to get these messages? Yeah, I mean, it's something that I think a lot of people are wondering about, right? Because to be drawing on neo-Nazi themes in public messaging to Americans is like, why? You know, white nationalists are a minority in this country. They're probably not even the largest group in the MAGA tent. But we know that some of this messaging has won voters. You know, again, that great replacement conspiracy theory that turned into voter replacement, you know, that was persuasive to many people during the 2024 election.

And so I think just as Eric Ward was saying in that earlier cut, this is about testing, you know, this is about testing how far these extremist movements. messages might be normalized and made palatable to a broader public. But also don't ignore the fact that when you live in right-wing media, as the president does, as J.D. Vance does, the constituency of people who are white nationalists and do respond positively to these messages is not insignificant. You know, they might be very small compared to the general population, but they're an important part of the Republican constellation. And there is also a sliding scale between some of this messaging and what I hear from voters a lot, which is like America for Americans. We should be prioritizing Americans. And that is a message that certainly

resonated with voters as President Trump has campaigned on it twice. Odette, is there any consequence to the government using this kind of language? I'm thinking about Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, talking about Western civilization and the need to control. borders because if you don't, it's essentially a threat to the fabric of the society and the survival of civilization itself. That's what he said. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting to see how that kind of framing of, you know, what this country is and who it's for is really placing the U.S. at odds with many of our traditional European allies. I mean, this has been quite a turn toward illiberalism that, you know, we just haven't seen, I think, in recent decades in the U.S.

But I think, you know, what Eric Ward said, that this kind of messaging quietly signals who this country is for really gets at the heart of the harm that happens when we see extremist messaging sort of make its way into the federal government. It's super divisive. And that division, I think distracts us from, you know, coming together on national issues that need to be solved together. And more immediately, I think it signals that harm done to people in the outgroup, if you will, the outgroup certainly in this moment being immigrants, you know, harm done to these people that are not being presented as true Americans, that harm will be tolerated, maybe even encouraged. And so it's really dangerous, I think, to the fabric of the society and also potentially

even to people's physical safety. Okay, we are going to leave it there for today, but it is something we are certainly going to continue to follow. Tomorrow on the pod, we will have all the political news from the week that we haven't gotten to yet. Please hit the follow button in your favorite podcast app so you don't miss a thing. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Odette Yousef. I cover domestic extremism. And I'm Mara Liason, senior. your national political correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.