If you spend enough time paying attention to political messaging, you’ll inevitably hear about “dog whistle” politics. The idea is straightforward: Just as actual dog whistles can only be heard by canines, officials and candidates often use coded language to deliver subtle messages to targeted audiences in ways that are not immediately obvious to everyone else.

Donald Trump and his allies have been using these rhetorical tactics quite a bit lately.

On Wednesday afternoon, for example, the official “war room” account for the president’s political operation published an item to social media that read, “Which way Western Man?” The typical person might not have given this much thought, but it’s quite likely that fascists recognized the phrasing immediately.

Last year a Newsweek report supplied the relevant context after Trump’s Department of Homeland Security pushed a similar message:

The Trump administration has been accused of quoting a white supremacist who was backed by a Neo-Nazi group, as part of its social media campaign to recruit immigration enforcement agents.

In a post shared to X on Monday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said “Which way, American man?”, a quote appearing to reference Which Way, Western Man, a 1978 book by the avowed white supremacist William Gayley Simpson, who argued Hitler was right and Jews must be killed.

The post from the president’s official “war room” account came three weeks after Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin published an item of his own via social media that accused the left of trying to “vandalize the demographics of America.”

For some generous observers, it might be tempting to give the Republican administration the benefit of the doubt, but there’s also a track record to consider. The New York Times reported earlier this year:

The posts have referred to neo-Nazi literature, ethnic cleansing and QAnon conspiracies, mused about deporting nearly a third of the U.S. population, and promoted lyrics from an anthem bellowed by the far-right militants of the Proud Boys.

Their authors are not on society’s fringe. They are in the offices of the White House and the departments of Homeland Security and Labor, using official government accounts.

The article highlighted several messages, including one from January in which the White House and DHS jointly posted a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The message began, “WE’LL HAVE OUR HOME AGAIN.”

It wasn’t long before observers noted this same phrase is the name of a song, which, as the Times noted, was written by members of a self-described “pro-White fraternal order” and has been embraced by white nationalist groups.

To be sure, administration officials have repeatedly denied that they’re trying to send signals to right-wing extremists and have insisted that the rhetorical similarities are coincidental.

That said, William Braniff, director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University, told the Times that one or two posts might be easy to overlook. But “when you add it all together,” Braniff said, “it’s much harder to dismiss.”

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