Critics of President Donald Trump have spent years calling him a Nazi, and they were back at it Tuesday after he posted an image of a bald eagle hanging from a White House balcony.
Trump wrote on Truth Social, “A Golden Gift to the White House for its 250th Birthday Year!”
The image showed a golden bald eagle, with an American flag emblem on its chest and stars around it, hanging from the Truman Balcony at the rear of the White House. CNN reported that the image appeared to be AI-generated, which may mean Trump was previewing an idea for a future White House decoration rather than showing something already installed.
The reaction was predictable.
A number of people on Truth Social and elsewhere, including users responding to the White House Rapid Response account, compared the eagle image to Nazi symbols. Some posted images of an eagle above a swastika. Others accused Trump more directly of trying to promote Nazi imagery.
Liberal influencer Alex Cole summed up the tone of the criticism with the line, “Dollar store Hitler showing off his bling.”
There is one fairly obvious problem with that argument: The bald eagle has been one of the central symbols of the United States since the nation’s founding era.
The eagle is not some obscure European symbol Trump dragged into American politics. It is on the Great Seal of the United States. It appears on official documents, government buildings, military insignia, currency, and countless patriotic displays. The bald eagle became part of the Great Seal in 1782, long before Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s.
That matters because context matters.
Yes, Nazi Germany used an eagle in its own iconography. But the existence of one symbol in one historical context does not erase its older and far more obvious meaning in another. By that logic, nearly every ancient or national symbol could be treated as suspicious simply because some ugly regime later tried to use something similar.
In this case, the American meaning is not difficult to understand. A bald eagle on the White House is about as straightforward a patriotic image as it gets.
The eagerness to turn it into a Nazi reference says more about Trump’s detractors than it does about Trump.
There is also a deeper ideological problem with the comparison. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s style, his policies and rhetoric do not line up with Nazi ideology. The Nazi Party, formally the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was rooted in authoritarian state power, racial hierarchy, and the subordination of the individual to the regime.
Trump’s political language, by contrast, has often leaned heavily on American founding principles: national sovereignty, individual liberty, religious freedom, and rights that come from God rather than government.
In my new book, “We Hold These Truths: The Two Beliefs That Still Hold the Power to Transform the Nation and the World,” I argue that those ideas remain central to the American experiment. They are also the opposite of the totalitarian worldview that animated Nazi Germany and other collectivist regimes.
In those systems, rights exist only to the extent that the state allows them. The government becomes the highest moral authority. The leader becomes the source of truth. That is not the logic of the Declaration of Independence.
Trump made that contrast clear during his Fourth of July speech at Mount Rushmore in 2020.
“Our Founders launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity,” he said.
He went on to point back to the Declaration of Independence, saying the founders “enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever” when they declared that all men are created equal.
“These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom,” Trump said. “Our Founders boldly declared that we are all endowed with the same divine rights — given to us by our Creator in Heaven. And that which God has given us, we will allow no one, ever, to take away — ever.”
That is not Nazi rhetoric. That is standard American founding language.
So critics can keep insisting that a bald eagle on the White House is really some secret Nazi message. But the claim collapses under even a basic understanding of American history.
Sometimes an eagle is just an eagle.
And in this case, it is the same eagle that has represented the United States for nearly two and a half centuries.