This is the president of the United States, Donald Trump. He is not a member of Marvel's fictional bad-guy organization, Hydra.
This is a comic book fan in a cosplay costume of Red Skull, a Marvel character and member of Hydra. He is not affiliated with the White House.
But when you type in hail-hydra.com on your web browser, you are redirected to the White House's biography page for President Trump. 👀
BuzzFeed News spoke to the owner of the domain, an IT worker from the Midwest, who said he purchased it in April 2014, around the same time Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released in theaters.
"The intent at the beginning was to occasionally point it at organizations I thought were a little too authoritarian and fascist-leaning," he said.
Now, if you're not familiar with Hydra, it is a bad-guy-filled organization from the Marvel comic books bent on world domination.
Captain America spends a lot of his time fighting them.
The owner of the domain, who requested anonymity, told BuzzFeed News that at first he planned to redirect hail-hydra.com to websites for his local politicians, but then in 2015 decided to direct it to then-presidential candidate Ted Cruz's site.
The URL redirected to Cruz's site until at least October, according to archive.org.
The domain owner told BuzzFeed News he then decided to point it toward President Trump's White House biography on Inauguration Day.
"Trump in particular seems to have a cult of personality about him where he thinks now that he is president everyone should be loyal to him first and not the constitution or laws of the land," the owner told BuzzFeed News. "I wanted to target Trump specifically and not the White House."
He said he hasn't been contacted by the White House or any law enforcement agencies. If he is, he said, he hopes authorities recognize his action as political commentary.
"In no way is [it] meant as a threat (other than a threat of me voting against him, again)," he wrote in an email.
He also said he is not a registered Democrat but does consider his politics "left-leaning."
He said he had no plans to change the redirect in the near future. As of Sunday, it was still pointing toward Trump's biography.
Until then...
