On Thanksgiving evening, when most Americans were walking off their turkey dinners, or veg’ing out in front of their TVs, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to issue a “happy Thanksgiving to all” missive. As is his wont, it was venomous, trafficked in scapegoating, and was overtly fascist in its terminology.
Trump’s rageful message was triggered by Wednesday’s shooting, in Washington, DC, of two young national guard members from West Virginia. One of the two died shortly afterwards. The shootings were awful, the death a tragedy. For Trump, however, they were simply an opportunity to generalize against millions of immigrants and to lock-down the country even more than he has already done.
Rachel Mills
The violent act was allegedly carried out by a young Afghan refugee, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a man who had reportedly worked for the CIA in Afghanistan, who had been admitted into the US in the aftermath of the Taliban’s return to power in 2021, and who received asylum this year—when Trump was already president.
That last inconvenient fact was buried in Trump’s blizzard of falsehoods and his gleeful effort to paint all immigrants as dangerous and all asylum-seekers admitted into the US during Biden’s tenure as a national security threat. It was almost as if he had been waiting for one of the National Guard members—deployed into DC as a raw display of presidential muscle—to be killed in order to unleash Armageddon against millions of immigrants and would-be-immigrants.
The felon-president immediately announced that all Afghan passport holders, including those who had helped the US and its allies during the twenty year occupation of Afghanistan, would be denied visas; that America would put a “permanent pause” on all immigration from “third world countries”—a move that effectively shuts down the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, without any Congressional input, and essentially moves the US back to the immigration system adopted in the 1920s, back when Trump’s father Fred was enthusiastically marching with the KKK; that all asylum-seekers admitted under Biden would have their cases re-examined; that large numbers of existing green card holders would also be subject to reevaluation; that all non-citizens would lose access to all government benefits; and that from now on in US policy would support “reverse migration,” a noxious term similar to the “remigration” proposals honed by neo-Nazi parties in Europe in recent years.
None of this, of course, would be accomplished through legislation; instead, this was Trump making policy on the hoof, the bile that he routinely shits out on social media masquerading as the legally enforceable will of the land.
Trump’s Truth Social posting is worth quoting at length, both for the sheer odiousness of the language and also for its senescent incoherence. “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation,” MAGAman wrote. “Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!” He opined, completely erroneously, that most U.S. residents born overseas “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels.” He declared he would seek to deport immigrants whom he views as “non-compatible with Western Civilization,” as if Beethoven or Goethe or Shakespeare or Newton would have even given the time of day to the unpleasant, uncouth, uncultured, uncurious, unserious, un-book-read, man from Queens.
Trump’s newfound concern for Western Civilization was in line with the State Department’s recent entirely odious cable to embassies around the world urging them to pressure allied governments to clamp down on mass migration in order to save Western Civilization, and a follow up social media posting from the State Department that "Mass migration is an existential threat to Western civilization and the safety of both the West and the world." (This from a department headed by Marco Rubio, whose own family, it should be noted again and again and again and again, migrated from Cuba to seek freedom and opportunity in the United States.)
Trump wrote that Minnesota was being overrun by Somali Muslims, accused the Minnesota governor of being “seriously retarded,” and mocked Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for wearing a “swaddling hijab;” alleged that she had married her brother; and derided her birth country of Somalia as being a “decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…” A reminder: this crude, coarse brutalist language isn’t normal presidential language. If my children had insulted classmates this way when they were in elementary school, I would have given them a time out and a stern talking to – so, I’m sure, would most parents around the country. Now, however, children can look their parents in the eyes and say, in all truthfulness, “but the president does it.” If they call their schoolyard enemies “stupid,” “ugly”, “piggy,”—all insults that senescent Trump has hurled at female journalists over the past week—they can again, in all truthfulness, simply respond that if it’s good enough for the president of the US of A, then it’s good enough for them.
When the president emits rants, on a daily basis, that even arch-segregationist George Wallace might have blushed at uttering, and when the State Department and president compete with each other to issue fire-and-brimstone pronouncements against immigrants that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels could have penned, you know that we as a country are in a whole heap of trouble.
When the most powerful nation on earth uses masked secret police to gratuitously break up families on a daily basis, it’s a pretty good indicator that the moral compass of those leading the country has simply ceased to function. Witness the rash of cases, in recent weeks, in San Diego, where spouses of US citizens have turned up for the final interviews before they were to be issued green cards, only to be summarily arrested by the secret police, handcuffed, rushed off to detention centers and prepped for deportation. That isn’t rational public policy—that’s simply sadism dolled up pretty in official government uniforms.
When the most powerful military on earth blows up alleged drug smugglers’ vessels on the high seas, based on nothing more than a hunch and a purported batch of secret “evidence” that it won’t even show to members of Congress, and then has a SEAL kill-team return, apparently on the orders of the Defense Secretary, to slaughter all remaining survivors of those initial strikes we have headed down an extraordinarily fascist path. After all, there’s nothing remotely legal about killing enemies who have been injured, are no longer able to fight, and functionally aren’t a part of the “battle” anymore. Spin this any way you can and you still end up confronted with the fact that the American government is, in all of our names, issuing patently illegal orders and, in consequence, people are being murdered, again in all of our names, in cold blood.
This is the might-makes-right theory so beloved of Fascist leaders of yore; Hegseth has simply updated it for the modern era.
It’s that same contempt for norms, that same sense of undiluted, unbridled, power – a power accountable to no-one—that allowed Trump to pardon the ex-president of Honduras, convicted by a US jury, sentenced by a US judge, for his involvement in high-level cocaine smuggling. This went down during the same week that the US leader took the country one giant leap closer to war with Venezuela for Venezuelan leader Maduro’s alleged involvement with drug traffickers. The word “hypocrisy” doesn’t even begin to do justice to the scale of this travesty. We need, I realize, a new political language to describe this onslaught against common decency.
It's tempting to turn away, especially during this holiday season. Don’t. What’s going on isn’t even remotely normal. When the president, the secretary of state, the defense secretary all goosestep to the same tune, something very, very bad is going down in DC. Fred Trump’s KKK affiliation dated back to the 1920s. A century later, his son Donald seems intent on implementing his white hooded, white robed, vision.
