The White House has published its model for the ideal American soldier, and the model is the Nazi SS officer, the uniform of genocide.

Paul Verhoeven wrote in the Guardian in 2018 that he built his 1997 film Starship Troopers from Leni Riefenstahl’s footage so the Federation would read as Nazi propaganda, and that he put one character in an SS uniform to make the point unmistakable.

Audiences missed it, he said. He was wrong. Americans got it, backwards.

On Sunday Trump posted a “next generation” Space Force uniform whose own caption credits “the discipline and functionality of the Starship Trooper uniform,” and the official White House Rapid Response account reposted it.

It is the Neil Patrick Harris intelligence officer coat of the Nazi SS, relabeled for “the Guardians of the space domain.”

Verhoeven filmed the villains as satire because he expected a lecture on fascism would be ignored. Americans watched his SS officer and ended up with a White House that costumed its soldiers to match, throwing Hitler salutes and licking Putin’s boots.