Trump "America First" Eagle design looks like the Nazi parteiadler emblem

I can’t stand Trump and love to find ways to hate him harder… but I saw the Marine logo and not at all the Nazi eagle.

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Having any living creature in any achievement of arms looking to sinister is unusual, unless you have a supporter facing the shield, or have a pair of creatures combatant or counter-rampant. The sinister side is … well, sinister. (That said, US patriotic art has never paid much attention to heraldic convention; read on for examples.)

I don’t quite get what you’re saying about the attitude of the eagle.

The one on the Great Seal is also affronté, with the wings displayed and espanié. (It’s shown volant, though, while the peculiar blazon under discussion has it overt, grasping the inescutcheon with its talons.)

The attitude has never been consistent in US symbology, though. The 1857-1858 cent had the eagle volant, wings addorsed. The 1916-1930 quarter had the eagle volant to sinister. The current quarter has the eagle displayed, wings abaissé. The 1916-1947 half-dollar had the eagle rizant, wings addorsed and inverted. The Eisenhower dollers had the eagle rizant, wings displayed and abaissé. The 1921-1928 silver dollar had the eagle close, perched on a mound with an olive issuant therefrom. In our history, we’ve probably used every version of heraldic eagle known to Man and invented a few of our own, with the possible exception of the double-headed eagle (adopted by both the Byzantine and Holy Roman Emperors as symbolic of titular Rome´s dominion over East and West, but with roots going all the way back to the Mycenaean Greeks).

A careful herald would probably scale the roundel containing the Stars and Stripes to include precisely the number of stars (molets, actually; a heraldic estoile has six arms, usually wavy) corresponding to the states that voted for Trump.

A clever herald would have buried somewhere in the arms a canting comment on the armiger.

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No, you’re right; I was misremembering. In 2014 Cuomo signed a law allowing ground-based and handheld sparklers, but you could find them in many places before that. You could get the poppers (those non powder-based silver fulminate things) pretty much anywhere. And of course in NYC you could easily get anything you wanted, just not legally.

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Don’t joke too soon about this: there is a current debate about getting rid of Nazi artwork at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium.

You cannot do away with racism simply because you dispose of monuments from racists, Dankwart Guratzsch would say. Even more: you can’t even do away with monuments simply because you dispose of monuments. Because, according to the architecture critic, he himself “creates” a fallen or blown up “room” monument. “Iconic storming never leads to enlightenment,” is how Guratzsch called his article for the feature section of Die WELT .
“History itself provides the most effective, most permanent correction of tradition,” he writes. “While the remaining monuments take on increasingly comical, outdated characteristics in their heroism and martial gesture, the removed ones remain alive like the undead.”
The reason for the article is that Berlin’s former Senator for Urban Development, Peter Strieder, among other things, wants to denazify the Olympic Stadium, namely to have sculptures, murals and reliefs removed.
Guratzsch thinks nothing of it, knowing that Strieder’s demands perfectly fit the contemporary era of iconoclasts: "The pseudo-religious zealots, the poets like Ernst Moritz Arndt and Eugen Gomringer, philosophers like Immanuel Kant, painters like Emil Nolde, conquerors and explorers like Christoph Columbus, politicians like Winston Churchill as racists fall from the pedestal, fall into the trap of self-caricature. "

The piece itself is paywalled, I linked the summary above and quoted from it.

And this is Germany of all places.

Just FTR, it took until 2018 for the Gouvernment to recognise that we should not have barracks named after Nazis, and there still aren’t all re-named. Fuck all this shit. Un-Fuck Nazis, Schnullernazis and all neo-fascists.

Never again.

Oh, and dear American friends, while we are at it: get rid of Trump ASAP. He and his cronies are doing far too much damage. Veils are off, and you know it.

ETA: I know you are trying to get rid of him as of day one. Even before. I’m not actually addressing BB BBS here. More like shouting in the ether.

Speaking of ether, I need a narcosis, probably.

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LOL. Of course the Trump campaign are using cheap as fuck stock art.

As for the design… eh, if it were anyone but Trump I wouldn’t have probably given this any measure of credence. Now with Trump you have to second guess everything. And they are so incompetent it’s impossible to tell which is intentional and which is them just tripping over their own dicks.

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Why? Maybe we can just… come up with something else?

Some aren’t out and out white supremacists tho. :woman_shrugging:

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I always thought it looked a bit like a plucked chicken. Which is quite a fitting design actually post World War One.

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I agree with your overall post, but disagree with that particular point. He isn’t the only problem and is symptomatic of a much larger problem, but he is very much the problem (for now, anyway). What I mean is, yes if it wasn’t for the issues you outline, plus a history of white supremacy and wealth worship that is intrinsic to them is nation, he wouldn’t have been allowed to flourish. However, being a profound idiot in nearly every way has not prevented him from being an extraordinarily powerful accelerant to the constant embers this country contains and nurtures. Hitler didn’t create the anti-Semitic, and anti-homosexual sentiment in Germany, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else taking them so far down that path.

Also: Welcome to BBS!

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My first impression was that it looked like the USMC eagle.

What the heck. The spread eagle has been used so many times for so many different things over the years, it’s impossible to use it without reminding people of something else they think is wrong.

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Given the campaigns history, probably a dog whistle. But at the same time, the Germans didn’t originate the use of the eagle in state symbols, and the US has many similar designs for it on medals, awards, and state seals.

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That was my thought as well, although it’s facing the wrong way.

My second thought was “Graphic design is my passion” which was borne out by @Elmer’s discovery:

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Fasces were symbols of Senatorial authority that were granted to people who had been authorized to act as agents with the power to speak and act on behalf of the Senate. They were never intended as symbols of absolute authority. In the early days before the Roman regime became a tyranny, it was always understood the right to carry them was temporary. Usually they were just bundles of rods, symbolic of the authority to order corporal punishment. They included axe heads only when the agent was granted authority to mete out capital punishment.

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Anti American eagle.

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I’m kind of shocked we’re still debating whether or not stuff that this administration does has some intentional racism and signaling attached? :woman_shrugging:

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I assume the eagle is holding a fresh baguette

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Yes. It looks like many other similar things, as others have pointed out. But you’re missing the pattern of behavior. This happens too often with this administration for it to not be intentional.

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The bundle of rods was always symbolic of ‘strength in unity’. In history, the extent to which the ‘unity’ referred to ‘consent of the governed’ or ‘following the imperial authority’ varied. Several US coins have borne the Rods and Axe, most recently the Winged Liberty (Mercury) dime, in which the fasces was wrapped in the olive branch, in symbology similar to the olive branch and arrows on the Great Seal: wishing for peace, prepared for war. The Roosevelt dime was rushed into production partly to get rid of the fasces; the winged Liberty design had been introduced a scant three years before Mussolini’s rise to power, and a conspiracy theory about the design had arisen.

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We’re debating, in some cases, whether the current Administration is simply too stupid to have intended some of the more subtle symbolism - which they surely would approve, if only they could grasp it. As someone said here, and I’ve become all too prone to repeat, Trump has abandoned the dog-whistle in favor of the vuvuzela.

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“Probably a dog-whistle, BUT”? What is the purpose of what follows your conjunction?

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