A prominent journalist drew controversy after comparing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s directive changing the State Department’s official font to a Nazi-era typography policy.
Former Voice of America White House bureau chief Steve Herman reacted publicly after Rubio ordered the department to revert to Times New Roman for official documents, reversing a Biden-era directive that adopted Calibri in 2023. Herman likened the decision to a 1941 Nazi order banning certain fonts.
“The Nazis, in 1941, banned the Fraktur font because it was ‘too Jewish,’” Herman wrote in a post on X.
Herman later reaffirmed the comparison on the social media platform Mastodon, responding in the comments section of his own post and confirming that he was directly linking Rubio’s directive to the Holocaust-era Nazi initiative.
Rubio’s order, titled “Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper,” was issued Tuesday. The memo stated that the change was intended to “restore decorum and professionalism” to the department’s written communications and to eliminate what Rubio described as a “wasteful DEIA program.”
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the memo read.
The directive reverses a decision made under former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who implemented Calibri as the department’s standard font in 2023 as part of a diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiative. Times New Roman had been the department’s standard typeface for approximately 20 years prior to that change.
Rubio argued in his memo that the switch to Calibri “achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence” and said the Biden-era change failed to meet its stated accessibility goals. He also said the move would better align the State Department with other federal agencies that use Times New Roman and other serif fonts.
Herman interpreted the font change differently, referencing a 1941 memo issued by Nazi official Martin Bormann on behalf of Adolf Hitler. That directive ordered that the “use of Schwabacher-Jewish letters by authorities will in future cease” in official Nazi communications.
The comparison drew attention online as debate continued over the significance of the font change and the broader political implications attributed to it.
Herman’s comparison was met with an overwhelmingly negative response on social media. His post received just three bookmarks, four likes, and 15 retweets, 13 of which were quote tweets criticizing the comparison. The post also generated 208 replies, the vast majority of them mocking or rejecting his claim. One user wrote, “Can you honestly be dumb enough to see an equivalence here? Or do you think your readers are?” Another responded, “‘Hitler disliked a font too.’ I’m sorry, but you sound hysterical. Or, perhaps, just dishonest.” A third commenter questioned the logic of the argument, writing, “You do realize that, at some point, somebody changed the font to Calibri, right? So, why wasn’t THAT a conspiracy?”
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Times New Roman is preferred, and sometimes mandated, by courthouses and government departments almost everywhere. One reason is for digital consistence and formatting. Government documents are. not supposed to be individualized, and the style of font, to be easy to use, must be consistent and standardized. Steve Herman is delusional – he should be fired for such a hyperbolic smear.