There is a long tradition of categorifying combinatorial Hopf algebras by the modules of a tower of algebras (or even better via the representation theory of a tower of groups). From the point of view of combinatorics, such a categorification supplies canonical bases, inner products, and a natural avenue to prove positivity results. Recent ideas in supercharacter theory have made fashioning the representation theory of a tower of groups into a Hopf structure more tractable. This paper applies such a program to the Malvenuto--Reutenauer Hopf algebra. In particular, we design functors on the representation theory of a tower of $p$-groups that realize the Hopf structure of the Malvenuto--Reutenauer algebra in such a way that its well-known fundamental basis corresponds to a supercharacter basis.