Panzer Man

On the long list of reasons the United States could have lost World War II—the terribly effective surprise Japanese attack, an awful lack of military readiness, the relatively untrained troops—there is perhaps no area in which Americans were more initially outmatched than armament. Americans had the M4 Sherman, a tank mass-produced by Detroit automakers. Germans had the formidable panzer, a line of tanks with nicknames such as Panther and Royal Tiger that repeatedly outgunned the Americans. In the 1940s, you couldn’t pick up a newspaper in the United States without reading about the panzer’s superior maneuverability and robust armor, qualities that made it especially hard for Americans to stop. “This doesn’t mean our tanks are bad,” The New York Times reported in January 1945. “They are the best in the world—next to the Germans.”

The panzer invoked Nazi might and aggression even decades after the war ended. Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” first published in 1965, contains this stanza: “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—— / Not God but a swastika / So black no sky could squeak through.” In the 2000s, popular video-game franchises—including Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor—released installments set during World War II that featured the panzer, etching it into the collective consciousness of a new generation of Americans.

So you can see why it’s noteworthy that Joseph Kent, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the National Counterterrorism Center, has a panzer tattoo. Last month, Mother Jones’s David Corn uncovered a shirtless picture of Kent from 2018, in which he has the word PANZER written down his left arm. Why? It’s not clear. Kent did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the Trump administration hasn’t offered an explanation either. Olivia C. Coleman, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, directed me to a post on X in which Ashley Henning, a deputy chief of staff at the agency, calls Kent a “selfless patriot who loves this country and his family.”

Kent’s tattoo is all the more curious considering his background. A former member of the Army Special Forces who twice ran for Congress in Washington State, he has had repeated interactions with far-right extremists. During his unsuccessful 2022 congressional bid, Kent consulted with Nick Fuentes, the young white supremacist, and hired a campaign adviser who was a member of the Proud Boys, a violent far-right group. (Kent ultimately disavowed Fuentes, and his campaign said that the Proud Boys member, Graham Jorgensen, was a low-level worker). The tattoo “could mean that he’s glorifying the Nazis. Or it could have a different context,” says Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, an organization that tracks right-wing extremism. Despite what the word evokes in history, panzer references are not common on the far right, Beirich told me. “I don’t think I’ve run across a panzer.”

Other discernible possibilities make less sense. Right-wing accounts on X have spread the claim that Kent has jäger—German for “hunter”—tattooed on his other arm. The two tattoos together would add up to “tank hunter.” The accounts claim that heavy-anti-armor-weapons crewman was one of Kent’s jobs in the Army. It’s oddly specific enough to sound plausible, except that I couldn’t find any evidence that Kent was part of an anti-tank unit—let alone one that would be targeting German tanks—or that he even has a jäger tattoo on his other arm. (Let me point out that Kent could resolve all of this by simply rolling up a sleeve.) There aren’t many other explanations. The United States Army has an installation on a base outside Stuttgart, Germany, called Panzer Kaserne, but there’s no information to suggest that Kent was ever deployed there. All we’re left with is a strange tattoo associated with Nazi Germany.

Of course, people frequently make strange tattoo choices. Some get ones they come to regret, and plenty have tattooed foreign words onto their body that they don’t fully understand. Yet it’s reasonable to wonder about the messages a person decides to make permanent on their body. Tattoos can connote in-group belonging or membership to a subculture. Olympians are known to get tattoos of the Olympic rings to commemorate competing in the games. Bikers famously love getting tattoos of skulls and flames. And then there are white supremacists, who have emblazoned themselves with swastikas, Norse runes, the SS logo, and other symbols. Why settle for a T-shirt or a flag when you can carve your values into your skin?

The Trump administration seems to strongly agree with the notion that tattoos are meaningful—but only when convenient for the president’s agenda. Consider Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident the Trump administration deported to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, prison camp last month. Garcia was living with protected legal status in the U.S., and the government’s own lawyers have acknowledged that he was deported because of an “administrative error.” Trump loyalists have doubled down on Garcia’s detention, in part pointing to his tattoos. On Truth Social, Trump posted a picture of Garcia’s knuckle tattoos—a leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull. The photo was altered with text above each symbol to spell out M-S-1-3, suggesting Garcia’s tattoos are a code for the gang MS-13. (Criminal-justice professors doubt that claim.) In an interview with ABC this week, Trump insisted it’s “as clear as you can be” that Garcia has MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles, even as ABC’s Terry Moran noted that the actual M-S-1-3 in the photo Trump has distributed clearly is Photoshopped in.

[Read: An ‘administrative error’ sends a Maryland father to a Salvadoran prison]

At least some of the hundreds of other immigrants who have been deported to CECOT appear to have been targeted simply for having the wrong tattoos. Andry José Hernández Romero, a makeup artist with no confirmed gang affiliation, was deported after his crown tattoos were reportedly mistaken for symbols associated with Tren de Aragua. Neri José Alvarado Borges, according to his family and friends, was deported for his tattoos, including an autism-acceptance symbol that he got in support of his younger brother.

Tom Homan, the White House’s “border czar,” has claimed that tattoos alone are not being used to label people as gang members. I reached out to the White House for comment, but received only another response from Coleman, the ODNI spokesperson, pointing to another post on X by Henning. This post mocks the fact that The Atlantic had contacted them to ask questions. In reference to Kent’s tattoo, Henning wrote, “Should we just reply that it’s photoshopped?” and then included a video clip of Trump’s ABC interview. To put this in plain terms: I asked the administration to address concerns that one of the president’s nominees has a tattoo associated with Nazis, and its response was to make a joke.

Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has some questionable tattoos of his own. On the right side of his chest, Hegseth has a large Jerusalem Cross: It has even sides and looks like a plus symbol, with four smaller crosses in each quadrant. On his right arm, Hegseth has a large tattoo of Deus vult (Latin for “God wills it”), written in Gothic script. Also on Hegseth’s right arm is a tattoo of the Arabic word Kafir, which commonly translates to “infidel” or “unbeliever.”

Both the Jerusalem Cross and Deus vult date back to the Crusades, the bloody series of wars between Christians and Muslims during the Middle Ages. But modern extremists have co-opted them to invoke a new war on Muslims. Insurrectionists who mobbed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, flew a Deus vult flag and wore shirts that featured it and the Jerusalem Cross. The Trump administration defends Hegseth’s ink: In an email, Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said that Hegseth’s tattoos “depict Christian symbols and mottos used by Believers for centuries,” and that “anyone attempting to paint these symbols and mottos as ‘extreme’ is engaging in anti-Christian bigotry.”

[Read: A field guide to flags of the far right]

The Jerusalem Cross is still occasionally used in non-extremist religious contexts, Matthew D. Taylor, the senior Christian scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies, in Baltimore, told me. “If that was the only tattoo he had, I’m not sure how I would interpret that,” he said. But Taylor finds Hegseth’s Deus vult tattoo to be noteworthy. “Deus vult is not a common symbol. It has very strong connotations,” he said. During the Crusades, Deus vult was the “phrase that sanctioned violence against Muslims.” Other members of the military have also tattooed Kafir on themselves, reportedly in an act of defiance against Islamic terrorism, especially those who have seen combat in the Middle East, as Hegseth has. An American soldier with a Kafir tattoo might be interpreted as a provocation—essentially, I’m an infidel. Come and get me. Taylor reads Hegseth’s Kafir tattoo as “a signal of aggression towards Islam and embracing Islamic aggression towards himself.” When Hegseth’s three tattoos are taken together, Taylor said, “it’s not hard to interpret what he’s trying to signal.”

Maybe both Hegseth and Kent have bad luck and got their tattoos without knowing what they might signal. Maybe they just don’t care about the possible darker implications. But this is the constant problem of trying to make sense of the signs from people in Trump’s orbit—the recurrent use of white supremacists’ favorite sequence of numbers, ambiguous (and sometimes unambiguous) Nazi salutes, and other dog-whistling. How much benefit of the doubt really should be given? At some point, there’s not a lot of room to interpret things any other way. As of 2024, Hegseth was a member of the Tennessee congregation of an Idaho-based church run by a Christian nationalist. He has appeared to express support for a relatively niche theocratic ideology that advocates for laws to be subordinate to the perspectives of Christian conservatism. Kent, in addition to associating with Fuentes during his first congressional campaign, was interviewed by the Nazi sympathizer Greyson Arnold. (Following the interview, a campaign spokesperson said that Kent was unaware of Arnold’s beliefs.)

Trump’s White House operates on inconsistency. High prices on consumer goods are bad, unless they are the result of the tariffs. Unelected bureaucrats must be excised from the government, unless they are Elon Musk and his team at DOGE. Free speech is a tenet of American values that is to be vehemently upheld, unless people say things that Donald Trump does not like. Tattoos matter. Except they also don’t. They are a sufficient admission of guilt—sufficient enough to disqualify you for due process, even—unless you are part of Trump’s team. If you’re on the losing side, there is no recourse. If you’re on the winning side, there are no consequences.