It’s hardly breaking new ground to suggest that former U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, the man who led the Trump administration’s paramilitary assault on Minneapolis last winter, looks and acts like a fascist. But so much of American public discourse, over the last decade or so, has involved refusing to “observe the observable,” in Joan Didion’s famous phrase. To put it another way, it seems inordinately difficult for our media class to make the daring leap from “it quacks like a duck” to the conclusion that it actually is one.
German media outlets, which arguably have some expertise in this area, were all over it with Bovino from the jump. Arno Frank of Der Spiegel described Bovino’s infamous olive overcoat as recalling the attire of an “elegant SS officer,” set against “the rowdy SA mob.” All that was missing from this “perfect cosplay,” Frank added, was a monocle. The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung also heaped mock praise on Bovino’s “Nazi look,” writing that his “closely cropped haircut” suggested he might have “taken a photo of Ernst Röhm to the barber.”
That mordant humor, however enjoyable, tiptoes around the unanswerable question of how, or even whether, we can tell the difference between cosplay and the real thing. How is a guy who wears that coat, cites Nazi general Erwin Rommel as an inspiration, and has suggested there may be 100 million “deportable individuals” in the United States — which is roughly 30 percent of the entire population — not a fascist?
There is, of course, no way to deport 100 million people without destroying civil society and the U.S. economy. It’s worth remembering that most of what bozos like Bovino have to say is just Trumpian stroke-book material. But you also couldn’t deport even a third that many people without undoing or rewriting the basic principles of citizenship, which is how we get to the Remigration Summit, a gathering of right-of-far-right weirdos at a Portuguese resort last weekend where Greg Bovino was the star attraction.
“Remigration” is the latest technocratic code word for ethnic cleansing, carried out mostly by handsome young men in expensive suits with Ernst Röhm haircuts, rather than by goons with Kalashnikovs. But the premise is pretty much the same: We find a way to kick out all the “unassimilated” (i.e., nonwhite) people, regardless of their citizenship or birthplace or anything else, from majority-white nations of “Europe and the West.” (Donald Trump has road-tested the phrase a few times, and there’s an “Office of Remigration” deep within the State Department bureaucracy. I would speculate that Stephen Miller has reluctantly concluded it’s not ready for prime time.)
Impressive rhetorical calisthenics would be required not to describe the Remigration Summit as fascist or neo-fascist, or at least highly fash-curious. (And only a few of its participants would be mad if you did.) At least officially, Europe’s major far-right parties kept their distance from the whole affair: Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France avoids the term entirely, and Germany’s AfD took a P.R. battering after an earlier remigration event in 2023. So it was mostly a bunch of Euro-prep dweebs from way more marginal parties, including Austrian remigration guru Martin Sellner, possessor of another Nazi-themed haircut; Afonso Gonçalves from Portugal’s Reconquista, a name that specifically recalls the expulsion of Muslims from the Iberian peninsula in the 15th century; and Andrea Ballarati, who left Italy’s main far-right party to found an identitarian group called Azione Cultura Tradizione (which I don’t think requires translation).
(Emanuele Cremaschi/Getty Images) From left, Martin Sellner, Afonso Gonçalves and Andrea Ballarati during the first Remigration Summit in Gallarate, Italy, May 17, 2025.
Nobody at a convention of right-wing crazies in 2026 has any direct connection to the fascist regimes of the 20th century, of course. But the ideological and philosophical lineage of these people is not difficult to trace. Take Sellner, the Austrian godfather of the remigration movement: He’s a protégé of German “nationalist intellectual” Götz Kubitschek, who has cited Carl Schmitt, leading political theorist of the Nazi era, as a key influence. The contemporary Falangist movement in Spain explicitly borrows its name and iconography from Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. The anti-immigrant movement in Britain can be followed backward, step by step, through the British National Party to the National Front skinheads of the ‘70s all the way to Oswald Mosley’s overtly pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s.
Earlier international gatherings of far-right nationalists, such as the Montreux Fascist Conference of 1934, focused on a familiar enemy that had supposedly “installed themselves as if on foreign territory, openly or occultly exercising an influence harmful to the material and moral interests of the nation which shelters them.” They were talking about the Jews, of course, while today’s right-wing crusaders direct nearly identical language at Muslim immigrants. But anyone who believes that the contemporary remigration agenda isn’t profoundly shaped by antisemitic conspiracy theory has surrendered to a moral blindness nearly as bad as fascism itself.
(Francesco Militello Mirto/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Supporters of the Falange march through Madrid during a demonstration in support of ”remigration” policies, May 8, 2026.
It’s pretty hard to top Greg Bovino in the category of crazy right-wing Americans, but the summit organizers may have done so. Veteran white supremacist crank Jared Taylor, author of “White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century,” was also on hand. So was a young man named Stefano Forte, who is, I kid you not, president of the New York Young Republicans. He previously appeared in Salon thanks to Russell Payne’s reporting on the “campaign” to get Zohran Mamdani deported, which does not appear to have succeeded.
Seriously, Republicans, and I’m addressing the handful of you out there who want to have a normal political party again someday: Come get your boy! Because he flew across the ocean from New York City, on somebody’s dime, to attend an alt-fright role-playing game about deporting all the brown people.
Given all that, I guess we can understand why U.S. mainstream media treated the entire event as too distasteful to acknowledge, the way you’d walk around someone taking a dump on the sidewalk. Bovino no longer holds any official position, and the rest of those people are irrelevant losers. (Spoiler alert: I don’t think that’s a good excuse.) To this point only Wired, Politico, NPR and Democracy Now! have covered the summit at all, and most of that was based on the original reporting of independent journalist Charles Davis (formerly of Salon and now in Europe).
As Davis observes, no muckraking was required and the Remigration Summit involved no closed-door meetings at undisclosed locations. Organizers promoted it through Facebook posts directed to a public website. That recalls how California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who is both an irritating online troll and a likely 2028 presidential candidate, which may be the same thing — responded to an especially disgusting DHS propaganda video starring Bovino last October: “They aren’t even trying to hide who they are.”
Indeed they’re not. Bovino has never tried to hide who he is, which I suppose is a point in his favor, as well as a compelling reason why the media should not ignore him now. The fact that he lasted as long as he did as the public face of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign should speak for itself. Yes, he became slightly too hot for the White House after his poorly trained thugs killed Renée Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis, and after public opinion began to shift against his reckless campaign of state terror. (I had to pause for a moment to contemplate the dystopian reality behind that sentence.)
But Bovino was, and is, a deeply resonant figure to the deepest and most committed elements of the MAGA base, or rather to those within it who fear that Donald Trump cannot go fast enough or far enough, and is now selling out to the weak-willed Panicans and traitorous Marxist liberals. Bovino represents the MAGA soul — perhaps we should say the MAGA Geist — which is not just kinda-fascist but deeply and enthusiastically fascist, not just curious about the legacy of Nazism but achingly, passionately eager to revive it.
Now that I’ve built the guy up, I don’t want to make him sound more formidable than he is. If nothing else, this era in American life has taught us that being dangerous and being a clown are not mutually exclusive. In Portugal, bereft of his BDSM sexy-cop Halloween apparel, Bovino came off not just as small-minded but as physically small, a pathetic little dweeb ventilating sour grapes at the boss who fired him. In the aggrieved tones of a middle-American hardware store manager, he told reporters on the scene that MAGA true believers had voted for mass deportation and that, since he and Kristi Noem were banished, they’re getting only a pale imitation and are very sad.
That a person so deeply stupid, and so inconsequential, was given secret-police powers of life and death by the president of the United States symbolizes way too much about our painful era. It is hilarious and tragic and ultimately unforgivable, all at the same time.
