Earlier this week, President Trump shared an article on his Truth Social platform celebrating his elimination of trans and queer people from military advertising. The opinion piece published by reporter Jeremy Hunt of The Washington Times, featured a crossed out upside down pink triangle. The inverted pink triangle was a symbol used by Nazis to identify LGBTQ+ prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. In response, LGBTQ+ Americans and allies are expressing fear surrounding the post—marking the third time that someone within or associated with the Trump administration has used Nazi symbolism.
Hunt’s piece praised “Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Hegseth’s emphasis on keeping our military the most lethal and effective fighting force on the planet” by banning LGBTQ+ visibility in military advertisements. It follows an executive order Trump signed in January, which declared that trans people are “unfit” to be part of the military. In response, U.S. military officials have begun dismissing trans military personnel from all branches. Yet, judicial officers like District Judge Ana Reyes of Washington, D.C., are already exploring an injunction to block this executive order.
Reyes specifically oversaw a hearing this past week featuring a memo distributed by the Department of Defense last month that says, “the medical, surgical and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.” In the hearing, Reyes responded by stating that each of the plaintiffs have “remarkable” service records, and the executive orders targeting trans people “scream animus.”
Trump posting a story that uses anti-LGBTQ+ Nazi symbolism takes this one step further—not only do his executive orders target trans peoples’ access to jobs, sports and gender affirming care, but his behavior online specifically references a tool—the inverted triangle—used in the mass genocide of LGBTQ+ people during the World War II.
Sex between men had been criminalized in Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code since 1871, but under Nazi rule, it is estimated that the Nazis imprisoned between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men. LGBTQ+ clubs, organizations and publications were some of the first groups affected by Nazi rise to power, even predating it with a 1932 crackdown on LGBTQ+ communities in Prussia. In the same year the Nazi Party rose to power, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior ordered all LGBTQ+ institutions to close, and Nazi officials began confiscating and destroying printed material created by and about the LGBTQ+ community.
LGBTQ+ scholars have pointed out the parallels between the first Nazi book burning at Magnus Hirshfled’s Institute for Sex Research—where he performed some of the earliest gender affirming surgeries—and modern efforts to erase the words “Transgender” and “Queer” from LGBTQ+ historical site web pages, such as the Stonewall Memorial and DuPont Circle just a few miles north of the White House in Washington, D.C.
Nazi leadership revised Paragraph 175 in 1935, making it easier to arrest and convict men and queer people for engaging in sex with men, and as neighboring countries such as Austria, Czechoslovakia and Alsaze-Lorraine fell under Nazi rule, LGBTQ+ people and communities in these regions were targeted, arrested and sent to concentration camps. There, they would be forced to wear clothing with the inverted pink triangle, as a sign to Nazi officials just like the Star of David for Jewish prisoners, of their identities.
As Matt Bernstein shared this week in a post, these prisoners faced sexual assault, castration and conversion therapy experimentation, including testoserone implants which attempted to “turn” them straight. And when concentration camps were liberated by Allied Forces, LGBTQ+ prisoners were often sent right back to prison to serve their sentence in violation of Paragraph 175, which remained on the books in Germany until 1994. It wasn’t until 2002 that Germany pardoned all people convicted, imprisoned and killed under the law.
During the Nazi regime, queer women and trans people were also persecuted, with the Nazi Institute of Forensic Medicine calling for the mass extermination of trans people. Today, these communities, along with modern gay men, have embraced the symbol of the pink triangle as a sign of queer liberation which dates back to the 1970s LGBTQ+ rights movement in West Germany where the pink triangle was used as a stark reminder of anti-gay violence. In the decade that followed, the pink triangle was readopted by LGBTQ+ communities—often with the point facing upwards—as a symbol of solidarity during the HIV/AIDS movement as it appeared in the “Silence = Death” posters put up across New York by the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) to raise awareness for the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s that memorials in honor of LGBTQ+ victims of Nazi rule were erected, including Pink Triangle Park in San Francisco dedicated in 2001 and the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism unveiled in Berlin in 2008.
Whether or not Trump knew the history of this symbol, would have shared the article without the graphic, or other hypothetical that conservatives and conservative apologists have presented since the post, it does not the deny the fact that Trump shared Nazi imagery that represents the mass genocide of LGBTQ+ people during World War II. And that by sharing a circle with a slash through its overtop of the inverted pink triangle, he is reinforcing far-right violence and further legislation against LGBTQ+ people.
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