Space Force’s new uniforms scream fascist supervillain

Donald Trump was a busy man when the film “Starship Troopers” debuted to largely confused audiences in 1997. Then 51, the future president was rebuilding his brand after a widely-reported bankruptcy and a separation from his second wife Marla Maples. Middle-aged Trump would have been a rare sight at a screening of Paul Verhoeven’s straight-faced sci-fi satire. The goofy, R-rated “Starship Troopers” famously tanked domestically among adults, but was a notable hit among teen boys, who sneaked into the flick in droves.

It’s unclear if Trump has ever actually watched Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards take on creepy-crawlies in an endless war of intergalactic attrition. But at 80, Trump has certainly seen a Nazi before. This didn’t stop him from proudly sharing an A.I.-generated mock-up of Space Force uniforms to Truth Social over the weekend. 

While the dress blacks looked suspiciously close to uniforms worn by Adolf Hitler’s SS, explanatory text that accompanied the mock-up made the Verhoeven homage explicit. If “Starship Troopers” was just the sci-fi schlock many contemporary critics took it to be, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Trump loves campy things, after all, and his administration has bent pop culture to fit their agenda many times over, unmoved by how often the creators ask them to stop. 

But Verhoeven’s Hollywood films are all satires of one aspect of American life or another. “RoboCop” took on Ronald Reagan’s hyperpolicing of urban areas when it was released in 1987. Eight years later, “Showgirls” poked fun at the entertainment industry and America’s cultural prudishness. “Starship Troopers” was the Dutch director’s joke about how quickly the U.S. could slide into unwitting fascism, using author Robert Heinlein’s unironic authoritarian bent as the set-up to his punchline.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

To that end, Verhoeven borrowed heavily from Nazi Party propaganda in the movie’s visual elements. To the eagle-eyed, the flag of the Earth’s government is a clear nod to the police forces of Nazi Germany. Sequences of the film borrow heavily from director Leni Reifenstahl, the German filmmaker who helped craft some of the most enduring images of the Third Reich. The opening of “Starship Troopers” echoes her “Triumph of the Will,” while Verhoeven’s lingering shots of the co-ed soldiers’ naked bodies recall her documentaries around the Berlin Olympics. 

“I was using Riefenstahl to point out, or so I thought, that these heroes and heroines were straight out of Nazi propaganda,” Verhoeven told The Guardian in 2018. “No one saw it at the time.”

In retrospect, his decision to largely avoid winking at the audience was a disaster. The only obvious joke in the film comes near the end. Verhoeven may have been thinking of the poor stateside reception of the steamy “Showgirls” when he chose to censor a scientist penetrating an alien with a phallic probe after two hours of relentless sci-fi gore. At least in space, Americans like their bodies sexless — and possibly ripped in half on a distant moon.

The uniforms of high-ranking Earth officers were the film’s most above-board allusions to Nazism. The wardrobe of Neil Patrick Harris, who played a military intelligence officer, appeared to be lifted entirely from the less-celebrated work of designer Hugo Boss. The scene where Harris approached a captured bug, rocking an ankle-length black trench coat with his blonde hair in a close crew cut, was the closest “Troopers” came to clubbing the audience in the ribs. 

“I don’t know whether or not the actors realised — we never discussed it,” Verhoeven said of playing his propaganda relentlessly straight. “I thought Neil Patrick Harris arriving on the set in an SS uniform might clear it up.”

With this in mind, the underlying question raised by the Space Force’s uniforms is whether Trump was tying the military branch he created to the Nazis by accident or on purpose. An intentional allusion wouldn’t be unprecedented for the administration. In 2025, Trump shared explicit fascist agitprop that accompanied a Washington Times op-ed about military recruitment in his second term and a shift away from messages of inclusivity. The header image was an upside-down pink triangle surrounded by a red “no” symbol. The upside-down triangle was used to identify gay men in Nazi concentration camps.

As The Atlantic’s Ali Breland has chronicled, the social media accounts of Trump administration departments “have become unrelenting streams of xenophobic and Nazi-coded messages and imagery” in his second term. The “fashwave” aesthetics of the online right and sloganeering around reclaiming “the homeland,” a term used to great propaganda effect by the Nazis, have regularly appeared in posts from the Homeland Security and Labor departments.

We’re more clued into Verhoeven’s deal than late ‘90s cinemagoers were. We can look at the films he’s made before and since, and see it as yet another example of his satirical bent. Similarly, Trump’s nationalist agenda means we don’t need to give him the benefit of the doubt when he starts playing with Nazi imagery. We know what he’s about.