Introducing the Trump Sieg Heil Tracker

If you see video of a prominent Trumpie making the "Heil Hitler" salute, please forward it to greatdivergence@gmail.com.

Wehrmacht, 1941 or CPAC 2025?

Backbencher today introduces a new feature: the Trump Sieg Heil Tracker.™

We will record here every instance, starting January 20, 2025, in which a prominent Trump supporter or administration official makes the Sieg Heil salute, also known as the “Heil Hitler” salute. The salute—arm extended 45 degrees, palm facing down—is on its way to becoming a routine demonstration of loyalty to the 47th president of the United States. Please send entries to greatdivergence@gmail.com. No Seig Heil entry will be considered unless it includes verifiable video of the salute in question.

There’s some danger that the Sieg Heil salute will become so very routine among Trumpies that keeping track will overwhelm Backbencher’s small (OK, nonexistent) staff. But we will do our best. Already the Sieg Heil salute is sufficiently routine that Steve Bannon’s at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC, pronounced “See-Pack”) failed to make Page One of my New York Times or Washington Post, even though it scared off Jordan Bardella, leader of France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen-founded National Rally Party, from attending. Bannon’s Sieg Heil also prompted Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist Holocaust denier who’s told Jews to “get the fuck out of America,” to say: “It’s getting a little uncomfortable even for me.”

That is the world we’re living in.

The 2025 round of Sieg Heils began with Elon Musk on inauguration day. The Anti-Defamation League, to its everlasting disgrace, called it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” That was not the consensus interpretation. Ask yourself why, if Elon’s was some regrettable inadvertent gesture, so many speakers at See-Pack and elsewhere made a point of repeating Musk’s words (“My heart goes out to you”) before repeating the same regrettable inadvertent gesture.

If someone tells you the Sieg Heil is actually a Roman salute, you may answer that No, it isn’t a Roman salute, it’s a faux-Roman salute popularized by the French painter Jacques-Louis David in his 1785 painting “Oath of the Horatii” and embraced later by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who fancied himself restoring the glories of the Roman Empire. It was subsequently perfected by Adolf Hitler, who required all Germans to make this regrettable inadvertent gesture whenever they were in the presence of a Nazi official. The Sieg Heil’s benign origin in Neoclassical French painting no more erases its current vile meaning as a tribute to Adolf Hitler than the swastika’s benign origin as a Sanskrit symbol of good will erases its current vile meaning in the West as a Nazi symbol. Duh.

I note with interest that all the people below lost their jobs after Seig-Heiling except Steve Bannon, who doesn’t have a job, and Elon Musk, who works for Donald Trump, who during his presidential last term told his chief of staff that “Hitler did some good things.” I’ll add additional entries as they are verified.

Seig Heil One: Elon Musk (inauguration rally)

Sieg Heil Two: Laura Smith, Supervisor of Towamencin Township, Pa. (at home; now ex-supervsor)

Seig Heil Three: Steve Bannon (CPAC)

Sieg Heil Four: Mexican actor Eduardo Verástegui (CPAC; this and two following h/t Holly Brewer)

Sieg Heil Five: Anglican minister Calvin Robinson (National Pro-Life Summit; the Anglican church kicked him out one week later)

Sieg Heil Six: Tom Hill, chief executive of Boise construction firm Engineers Strategies Inc. (Hill later apologized for this “attempt at humor and parody”; still later Hill resigned, saying the gesture “has overshadowed the mission of our company.”)