Hey kids, history is useful. For example, a lot of Nazis today love to say there is no true Nazi, and that they can’t ever be called one credibly, while they plainly do everything they think that a Nazi would.

The accusations against Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino have merit not least of all from the costume history perspective. This is what a Nazi would and did wear.

While no single element exclusively says Nazi costume, the curated combination of elements is unmistakable visual quotation of the SS officer aesthetics. If it wears a kilt, it’s well on its way to being a Scotsman. When seeing a red bearded heavy man with a loud brogue tossing a caber, while in a kilt, if you can’t admit a true Scotsman at some point, you’ve failed 101 logic.

Bovino is displaying an obvious Nazi costume.

We aren’t talking accidental resemblance, because achieving this specific silhouette requires very deliberate tailoring choices that reference very particular historical moment. This is not a generic “military coat.” He even boasts how this unique costuming was less scrutinized under Biden, deploying a Nazi tactic to blame others for failing to stop a rise of Nazism sooner.

It’s actually worse than that, rhetorically, because Bovino went from quietly attending a ceremony in his costume, as if nervously dog whistling, to flaunting himself prominently. He came out of the closet, if you will, under Trump to widely spread awful DHS propaganda videos of this coat with “WE WILL NOT BE STOPPED” Nazi overlays, while leading masked stormtroopers through American cities. The false equivalence of obscure quiet hidden acts with his recent loud violent “Blackshirt” propaganda is actually more damning evidence against Bovino.

Let’s examine the costume uniqueness precisely, like how it might have appeared under 1940s sedition charges.

He flaunts a military-style greatcoat (Mantel) with the characteristic long length, wide shoulders, and dramatic cut associated with German officer coats of the 1930s-40s.

It features the out-of-style double-breasted closure with prominent metal buttons. It’s such a dated/dead design because Nazi SS officer greatcoats featured this exact configuration, typically with silver buttons against black wool.

The exaggerated lapel width is also out-of-style and an absurd-looking detail. It matches the theatrical styling of Nazi officer dress uniforms, designed by SS officer Karl Diebitsch to project absurdist authority and oversized intimidation. The coats literally were designed by the SS themselves, for Hugo Boss’ slaves to produce.

The black trench coat has been associated with mass shooters in America not by coincidence. The Nazi SS had specifically adopted black as their signature color (1932-1939), making black military-cut greatcoats particularly loaded as power projection garment by aspirational terrorists threatening democracy.

This coat’s overall gestalt is a high collar, cinched waist, flared skirt below, which conveys the exact SS officer profile.

Black and white isn’t the only reference. Here is what Bovino looks like in color.

Bovino was the only person among over a dozen federal agents invading Minneapolis while wearing a boxy greatcoat and scarf. Everyone else appeared in standard paramilitary tactical gear, as if a scene from Reagan’s shock troops committing crimes against humanity in Guatemala, Chad, Indonesia or Somalia. The costume of evil isn’t needed. But Bovino chose to propagandize it as Nazi stormtrooper operations through American neighborhoods, after ICE agents executed a 37-year-old mother of three.

Bovino then celebrated the execution by saying “Hats off to that ICE agent. I’m glad he made it out alive. I’m glad he’s with his family” invoking a Nazi hats off to Sippenhaft doctrine of family only for enforcers, orphans for anyone resisting.

The man wears Nazi shaped costume, throws a Nazi shaped salute, leads Nazi shaped paramilitary operations through American cities, celebrates Nazi shaped extrajudicial killing, for a Nazi shaped administration whose DHS account engages with self-identified Nazi sympathizers.

If not a Nazi, why so shaped like a Nazi?

Trump has been on a racist lunatic rant at Davos calling Africans “low-IQ” and mocking Somalia as a “failed state” while his own key advisor’s firm actively supported the dictator who destroyed it.

The people who took money to whitewash Somalia’s destruction now blame Somalis for their “failed culture.” Trump’s inner circle profited from enabling Somalia’s destruction, hid the evidence, and now mocks Somalis for the wreckage.

Some of us remember.

Barre was overthrown in 1991. His regime violently imploded. The obvious dictator pattern can be seen, destruction followed by collapse. The question today, just like 1989, isn’t whether authoritarian consolidation by Team Trump fails—it’s how much damage it inflicts before it does.

Flashback to a Trump advisor’s own words, when he was expressing the rules don’t apply to them:

We all know [the dictator of Somalia] Barre is a bad guy, Riva. We just have to make sure he is our bad guy.

This was from Paul Manafort, on assignment in 1989:

…to clean up Siad Barre’s international reputation, which needed plenty of soap.

Manafort was referring to Somalia’s dictator killing an estimated 200,000 Isaaq tribe members. The destruction of Hargeisa was so total that it earned the nickname “the Dresden of Africa.” The UN concluded it was genocide. The future Trump team advisor concluded he could make it disappear in a PR campaign.

Some of us remember.

Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly were known as the “torturers’ lobby” for representing so many corrupt dictators involved in human rights abuses. Trump is merely the latest addition to their list. Stone, who continues to orbit Trump, was a founding partner. Even if you didn’t know about the Barre connections, surely you knew that Manafort also worked on the Suharto genocide in Indonesia?

The mainstream coverage of Trump at Davos completely misses how damning the historical record is for him. He wasn’t just calling Africans dumb, he mocked those who pay his team to help them.

Meanwhile, Israel just landed the first diplomatic recognition of Somaliland. The region Trump dismisses as worthless has become strategically essential to replace American military presence after Hegseth’s humiliating failures in the Red Sea.

Trump’s team broke Somalia, buried the evidence, mocks the victims, and now depends on the region they destroyed to compensate for their own military incompetence.

Somalia’s dictator paid Manafort a million dollars to bury genocide. Decades later, Trump invokes that as proof Somalis are the ones with “low IQ.”

Remember when Trump said this?

I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?

The news is getting truly bizarre.

“…I learned that her parents, and her father in particular… I hope he still is, but I don’t know, [he] was a tremendous Trump fan,” he said. “He was all for Trump. Loved Trump, and it’s terrible.”

[…]

“I was told that by a lot of people,” said Trump, referring to his comments about Good’s father. “They said, ‘Oh, he loves you’ … I hope he still feels that way.”

The grieving and heartbroken father is being pressured, implicitly and publicly, to affirm his loyalty to the administration whose agents killed his daughter. False claims by the White House about a “domestic terrorist” suddenly evaporated and become a “tragedy” the moment the victim’s family turned out to be politically aligned.

The Romans called it hostis versus civis – the enemy who exists outside law’s protection versus people within. Trump is overtly calling for a split within American families based on political loyalty, making citizenship rights revocable based on response to state violence against their own.

In Stalinist show trials, families were required to publicly denounce executed relatives to avoid classification as enemies. The Chinese Cultural Revolution demanded similar performances. The mechanism is the same: force the family to choose between mourning their dead and maintaining their own protected status. The public nature isn’t incidental – it’s the point. Other families are meant to see the choice being imposed.

One infamous American example, as dramatized in “to strike at a king” and “Good Night, and Good Luck“, was Milo Radulovich. The Air Force Reserve lieutenant was dismissed, not for anything he did, but because his father subscribed to a foreign-language newspaper and his sister allegedly went to political meetings. The military demanded he denounce his family to keep his commission. He refused. Public exposure in 1953 of the loyalty-test mechanism generated enough pressure to reverse it.

Trump’s claim he “was told that by a lot of people” about political affiliations reveals they are reported as operationally relevant information to him. That’s further evidence of how the system splits the country now, intentionally aiming for separate and unequal treatment of Americans.

The loyalty test of the family members establishes that compliance is rewarded. And then normalization of the state violence establishes that any resistance carries risk.

The current “it just happens” framing of Trump converts an act of deadly force by a federal agent into something akin to lightning – unfortunate, unavoidable, without accountability. Combined with the DOJ shutting down the civil rights investigation while simultaneously subpoenaing Governor Walz, the political storm is clear: Trump will investigate those who document or resist an execution, but not the executioner.

Six federal prosecutors resigned over that decision. That’s something important to families under pressure to prove loyalty while their children are executed by the state.