Charlamagne thinks God wants Americans to remember something about 1940s Germany: the Nazis lost. And he's predicting the same fate for MAGA.
The radio host used his Monday broadcast to argue that America will eventually go through a 'de-MAGA-ification' modelled on the Allied programme that dismantled Nazi ideology after the Second World War, complete with prosecutions of Trump and his allies. His comments came days after Border Patrol agents fatally shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital who had been filming an immigration enforcement operation on his phone when he was killed on 24 January, according to Fox News.
Charlamagne told listeners that Nazi ideology was outlawed through denazification, and predicted the same would happen to the MAGA movement once Trump leaves office. He reminded his audience that regime leaders were prosecuted and tried as war criminals at Nuremberg, suggesting Trump administration officials would eventually face similar accountability.
Second Amendment Hypocrisy at the Heart of His Critique
The host also tore into the administration's response to the Pretti shooting, accusing officials of treating the Constitution with contempt.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had emphasised that Pretti was armed and claimed he arrived at the scene intending to kill officers. But Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara confirmed Pretti held a lawful permit to carry and had no criminal record beyond traffic tickets, NPR reported.
Charlamagne seized on what he saw as blatant hypocrisy. Americans carry guns to Starbucks and grocery stores without anyone batting an eye, he said, yet exercising that same constitutional right at a protest now gets you labelled a terrorist. He called it the behaviour of an authoritarian government hellbent on distorting reality to justify its actions.
The numbers in Minneapolis tell their own story. Pretti's death was the third shooting by federal immigration agents in less than three weeks. O'Hara noted his department went the entire previous year without officers firing at anyone, despite recovering roughly 900 illegal firearms and arresting hundreds of violent offenders. Of the three homicides recorded in Minneapolis so far in 2026, two were carried out by federal agents.
What Denazification Actually Looked Like
The comparison Charlamagne drew isn't just rhetorical. After Germany surrendered in 1945, the Allies launched a sweeping programme to root out Nazi influence at every level of society. They banned the Nazi Party outright through Control Council Law No. 2, tore swastikas off public buildings, and purged more than 30,000 book titles from libraries. Millions of copies were destroyed. Regime leaders faced trial at Nuremberg, with many executed or imprisoned for war crimes, according to the Allied Museum in Berlin.
Ordinary Germans didn't escape scrutiny either. Civilian tribunals sorted the population into five categories based on their involvement with the regime, ranging from 'Major Offenders' down to 'Persons Exonerated.' Those found culpable faced prison, fines, or bans from public employment.
The legal framework built during that era remains in force today. Section 86a of the German Criminal Code still bans Nazi symbols, the Hitler salute, and SS insignia. Holocaust denial became a crime in 1994, carrying penalties of up to five years in prison, PBS reported. Neo-Nazis who tried modifying the symbols to skirt the restrictions found the laws expanded to cover their workarounds.
Enforcement became truly systematic in the 1960s, when a younger generation of Germans began confronting their parents and grandparents about what they had done during the war. That pressure from below, combined with legal mechanisms from above, embedded anti-Nazi sentiment deep into German public life.
Neither the White House nor the Department of Homeland Security responded to requests for comment on Charlamagne's remarks. The Minneapolis shootings began on 7 January when ICE agents killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother who had just dropped her child at school.
