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.”
