AMERICA IS A FASCIST STATE
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Opposed to anarchism, democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism fascism is at the far right wing of the traditional left–right spectrum.
AMERICA IS A ROGUE STATE
A nation or state regarded as breaking international law and posing a threat to the security of other nations.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/05/opinion/trump-musk-federal-government.html
by Jamelle Bouie
February 5, 2025
New York Times
Listen to this article · 9:47 min Learn more
Jamelle Bouie
Even if anyone had elected Elon Musk to anything, the past week would still be one of the most serious examples of executive branch malfeasance in American history.
Musk has seized hold of critical levers of power and authority within the federal government, apparently enabling him to destroy federal agencies at will, barring congressional action or judicial pushback.
Musk’s team, which includes a small gaggle of young aides, reportedly ages 19 to 24 — have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management and the General Services Administration. They also have access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, which provides a direct line to sensitive information about tens of millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers and bank accounts. By his own account, Musk could use his access to the payments system — which disburses congressional appropriations to the many payees of the government — to effect a kind of personal line-item veto. If he does not believe that a program or grant is effective — if he thinks that it constitutes “waste, fraud and abuse” — then he will cancel its funding and leave it to starve on the vine.
The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing.
“When you see prices go up at the grocery store, the prices are going up because of excess government spending,” he said in an online conversation with, among others, Vivek Ramaswamy and Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa. “It’s very important to connect these dots. The supermarkets are not taking advantage of you. It’s not price gouging; it’s that the government spent too much.” (This, it must be said, makes no sense.)
Again, if Musk had been elected to some office, this would still be one of the worst abuses of executive power in American history. No one in the executive branch has the legal authority to unilaterally cancel congressional appropriations. No one has the legal authority to turn the Treasury payments system into a means of political retribution. No one has the authority to summarily dismiss civil servants without cause. No one has the authority to take down and scrub government websites of public data, itself paid for by American taxpayers. And no private citizen has the authority to access the sensitive data of American citizens for either information gathering or their own, unknown purposes.
The thing, of course, is that Musk isn’t elected. He is a private citizen. He was neither confirmed for a cabinet job nor formally appointed to a high-level position within the administration. He does not even have a presidential commission; he has been designated a “special government employee.” Musk says that he is acting on the authority of the president of the United States. Even still, it is not as if the president of the United States has the authority to unleash an unvetted, unaccountable private citizen onto some of the most sensitive data possessed by the federal government.
But that is the situation. A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal government to one of the richest men on the planet, if not the richest, whose own interests are tangled up in those of rival governments and foreign autocracies as well as the United States. The public has no guarantee that its most sensitive data is secure. At best, they have the personal word of Donald Trump, which, paired with a few dollars, might buy you a cup of coffee.
The only institution capable of responding to this with any alacrity is Congress. But Congress is also led by Republicans, and both the Senate majority leader, John Thune, and the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, have declined to take any steps to arrest the president’s illegal arrogation of power or Musk’s destructive effort to run the federal government. Thune and Johnson, acting with the support of Republicans in both chambers, have, in effect, renounced their power over the purse and abnegated their powers of oversight. Their Congress is supine, submissive and subordinate, less the equal of the president than a tool of the executive branch — a subject of his will.
Somewhere, King Charles I is jealous.
To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.
Together, Trump and Musk are trying to rewrite the rules of the American system. They are trying to instantiate an anti-constitutional theory of executive power that would make the president supreme over all other branches of government. They are doing so in service of a plutocratic agenda of austerity and the upward redistribution of wealth. And the longer Congress stands by, the more this is fixed in place.
If Trump, Musk and their allies — like Russell Vought, the president’s pick to lead the Office of Management and Budget and a vocal advocate of an autocratic “radical constitutionalism” that treats the president as an elected despot — succeed, then the question of American politics won’t be if they’ll win the next election, but whether the Constitution as we know it is still in effect.
The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.
Now the judicial system will weigh in on the situation. As lawsuits are filed, it will try to adjudicate claims of lawful authority and executive power. And thanks to the efforts of Democratic state attorneys general, there has already been an injunction against the president’s effort to freeze federal funding. But the courts are slow-moving and reactive, and as we wait for the federal judiciary to make its moves, Trump and Musk are creating facts on the ground.
At this point in any argument like this one, the question arises of what should be done and, more critically, what can be done? The sad answer is not that much. Those with the direct institutional power to slam the brakes lack the will and those with the will lack the power.
If Trump and Musk’s opponents have a tool to use, it is the power to shape public opinion — to show as many of the American people who will listen that something truly malign and radical has hijacked the normal functioning of the federal government. And it is to the advantage of those opponents that Trump and Musk’s efforts to commandeer the executive branch are taking shape side by side with serious accidents — like the deadly airplane crash near Ronald Reagan National Airport last week — that dramatize the importance of a competent, apolitical civil service.
For as much as some of Trump’s and Musk’s moves were anticipated in Project 2025, the fact of the matter is that marginal Trump voters — the voters who gave him his victory — did not vote for any of this. They voted specifically to lower the cost of living. They did not vote, in Musk’s words, for economic “hardship.” Nor did they vote to make Musk the co-president of the United States or to give Trump the power to destroy the capacity of the federal government to do anything that benefits the American people. They certainly did not vote for a world where the president’s billionaire ally has access to your Social Security number.
Trump may have lied about the influence of the far right on his plans, but it is clear that his voters did not anticipate anything other than a return to the status quo before the pandemic. What they’re getting instead is a new crisis pushed on by a dangerous set of corrupt oligarchs and monomaniacal ideologues. As dangerous as the president and his allies are, however, their hold on government is not as total or complete as they imagine. The president’s opponents, in other words, still have room to maneuver.
But as those opponents strategize their response, it is vital that they see the important truth that there is no going back to the old status quo. President Trump and Elon Musk really have altered the structure of things. They’ve taken steps that cannot be so easily reversed. If American constitutional democracy is a game, then they’ve flipped the board with the aim of using the same pieces to play a new one with their own boutique rules.
And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.
Anything less will set us up for yet another Trump and yet another Musk.
More on Trump’s first weeks:
Opinion | Tyler McBrien
What Is ‘State Capture’? A Warning for Americans.
Feb. 5, 2025
Opinion | Thomas B. Edsall
‘Trump’s Thomas Cromwell’ Is Waiting in the Wings
Feb. 4, 2025
Opinion | Michelle Goldberg
The Familiar Arrogance of Musk’s Young Apparatchiks
Feb. 3, 2025
Opinion | Ezra Klein
Don’t Believe Him
Feb. 2, 2025
Opinion | Donald P. Moynihan
Trump Has a Master Plan for Destroying the ‘Deep State’
Nov. 27, 2023
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
Some Current Facts On The Ground (Or Truth Never Lies):
THE SCUMBAG-IN-CHIEF AND ITS MASSIVE NATIONAL CULT IS THE JAILER AND WE ARE ALL ITS HOSTAGES AND VICTIMS
(COMPLICIT AND OTHERWISE)...
MEANWHILE WE ARE BEING RULED BY A RAPIDLY COLLAPSING AND DRACONIAN GOVERNMENT WE STILL PERSIST IN ERRONEOUSLY AND SUPINELY CALLING 'OUR DEMOCRACY'
The Trump Administration’s First 100 Days
Tariffs: President Trump’s demands on the United States’ neighbors are difficult to measure. That allows him to declare victory when he sees fit.
U.S.A.I.D.: Nearly the entire global work force of the main American aid agency will be put on leave, according to an official memo the agency posted online.
DOGE: Unions representing federal workers sued the Treasury Department and its head, Scott Bessent, in an effort to block Musk and his team from accessing the federal payment system.
Immigration: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed during a visit to the southwestern border to use thousands of U.S. active-duty troops to help stem migrant crossings.
Government Web Pages: More than 8,000 web pages across more than a dozen U.S. government websites have been taken down, as federal agencies rush to heed Trump’s orders targeting diversity initiatives and “gender ideology.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones: Trump came right ‘out of the gate’ with a racial agenda—not an economic one
In the decades following Reconstruction, the country experienced The Great Nadir-- a period of racial retrenchment and violent enforcement of white power. America is at an inflection point, warns Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones, and faces the risk of slipping into a second Nadir in race relations more than 140 years after the first, which lasted nearly four decades. "We can decide in this moment as Americans: are we going to enter another nadir, or are we going to push back against that and continue to pursue an egalitarian society?""What's Past is Prologue..."
A response in our Forum:
This, Our Second Nadir
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qb1AZeaeQ18We need a restoration of historical thinking.
by N. D. B. Connolly
February 21, 2018
Boston ReviewIt has been worse. Let’s not forget “The Nadir,” as the historian Rayford Logan coined it: the period following Reconstruction in which America witnessed the resurgence and bloody normalization of White Power politics. Between the 1870s and the turn of the twentieth century, southern whites took over the political and propaganda apparatus in all eleven states of the former Confederacy. They rewrote state constitutions with the explicit aim of disfranchising black voters. Racial terrorism, once held underground by the presence of federal troops, morphed into pogroms and spectacle lynchings carried out in broad daylight. Under piercing cries that “The South Will Rise Again,” whites, sometimes by the hundreds and even thousands, attacked African Americans and their property. By some estimates, whites killed as many as half a million black people in politically motivated murders. These efforts were so terrifyingly effective that, over just one decade in Louisiana, white officials and vigilantes slashed the number of black registered voters from 130,000 to some 1,300—a decrease of 99 percent.
Today’s calls to step away from ‘identity politics’ represent implicit calls to step away from civil rights.
The Nadir coincided with the Gilded Age, and not by coincidence—a point Walter Johnson makes very clearly in his analysis of racial capitalism. As once-conquered Confederates snatched black people’s legal protections, the courts and Congress elevated corporations to their current status as rights-bearing citizens. In their efforts to secure even modest concessions from capital, white workers abandoned and turned on black comrades, splintering interracial labor movements. “There began to rise in America in 1876,” W. E. B. Du Bois remarked ruefully in Black Reconstruction (1935), “a new capitalism and a new enslavement of labor,” one that bridled “white, yellow, brown and black labor.” Then, as now, capitalism’s malcontents, with their many colors, suffered a shared predicament. Fractured, “a living working class” transferred its “political power from the hands of labor to the hands of capital, where,” Du Bois explained, “it has been concentrated ever since.” In light of the ensuing imperialism, death, and evaporating livelihoods, the professor maintained, “God wept.”
With the presidency of Donald Trump we can expect a Second Nadir. As was true during the first, white capital firmly holds the levers of both politics and propaganda. And if we expect to have any chance at all to prevent the losses of life and rights that white supremacy inevitably exacts, we are going to have to marshal a little Jim Crow wisdom—knowledge carried through and beyond the Nadir—about how racism got us into this mess.
The first lesson: we should expect steps back before we move forward. Liberal politicians will compromise with white supremacist, nativist, and chauvinist elements, this time in the Republican Party, further building inequality into the political system. The precedent is clear. In the forty years that followed mass black disfranchisement in the South, the best African Americans could hope for was the federalization of Jim Crow segregation. President Woodrow Wilson, a supposed reformer, expelled and demoted African Americans across the federal bureaucracy. From their safe congressional seats and with the power of the filibuster, southern congressmen and senators ensured that labor, housing, education, and hate crime legislation all favored southern designs, which included increased federal investment in sectors already controlled by capital—say, cotton cultivation—and minimal tampering with race regulations codifying Jim Crow.
The subsequent New Deal salvaged the American economy, in part by creating for mostly white employers, landlords, bankers, and developers a series of very profitable racial niche markets. Blocked from joining unions, blacks and agricultural workers, for instance, sold their labor for next to nothing, further protecting white wealth. Tenants in both rural and urban enclaves around the country—white and black—suffered gouging so dramatic that landlords could easily fetch annual returns of 25–60 percent on their rental investments. (Typical returns in white markets today stand at 4–6 percent.) These policies and others also set in motion another several decades of structured racial inequality as confined African American communities became sites of pointed, predatory taxation by white-controlled local governments and predatory pricing for durable goods, services, and housing.
Second lesson: in light of racist structures, we should not expect solidarity as the default response from subaltern people. In order to break out of Jim Crow regulations, many Americans elected to distance themselves from African Americans neighborhoods—sometimes violently—or simply denied, in spite of their African descent, being black altogether. In the century following the Nadir, people of all colors hungrily sought out political whiteness, either by passing for white or by pursuing legal or diplomatic exemptions from being “colored.”
We should understand, though, that passing in the twenty-first century will not be of the kind depicted in black-and-white movies, for after the Second Reconstruction the meaning of whiteness changed. Everyone who could was suddenly in a hurry to disown it. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the moral challenges of the broader black, brown, and red freedom struggles, scores of Americans bolted from whiteness looking to identify with any variation of “— American.” Work by Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Nancy MacLean, Jared Sexton, and others explores how the hyphenated identities we now take as a given—and their “mixed race,” “neither-black-nor-white” variants—emerged in the wake of Title vii of the Civil Rights Act. Affirmative action, new employment, and educational benefits were extended to those who could claim practically any association at all with the history of racial or ethnic discrimination in America. New forms of institutional multiculturalism in the 1960s and early 1970s distributed widely the government’s obligation to redress historical wrongs. In place of so-called “Negro” benefits that could break down the vestiges of Jim Crow, practically everyone, in the eyes of the state, got to be some kind of minority.
Race on the back burner; economy, small government, and values on the front. The old, southern liberalism nationalized.
This brings me to the third lesson: multiculturalism will not save us. Multiculturalism, as an alternative to mandated desegregation, is actually a southern—or, rather, segregationist—value, steeped in the elective traditions of southern liberalism. These include, in the Jeffersonian tradition, strict racial regulation and laissez-faire economics (the latter for whites only). Rather than mandated fair employment measures, decried by Jim Crow politicians as “autocratic” and “tyrannical,” the country got affirmative action, a program that allows employers to cultivate their own multiculturalism relative to their own perceived market demands. Opposing the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Zora Neale Hurston argued against mandated integration with calls, instead, for “growth from within” and “ethical and cultural desegregation.” This was a vision of culture over policy. Blacks and whites, her argument went, could come to understand each other on their own terms, not on terms set in some far-off bureaucracy in Washington.
As the 1960s became the 1970s—in battles over everything from school busing to anti-poverty measures—volunteerism and conflations of inequality with culture began to replace mandated desegregation efforts and an institutional acknowledgement of history. Indeed, white supremacy stays alive in American institutions through the pointed erasure of historical thinking, which is necessarily race thinking. The Supreme Court removed historical consciousness from college admissions policy in 1978 with its decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke; admissions committees could no longer consider past, group-based discrimination when determining individuals’ present-day access to college. As Thurgood Marshall explained in his dissent, “It is more than a little ironic that, after several hundred years of class-based discrimination against Negroes, the Court is unwilling to hold that a class-based remedy for that discrimination is permissible.” In its willful ahistoricism, the Court’s rulings in Bakke and subsequent cases, including Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), have effectively affirmed a “diversity regime” that knows how to celebrate difference without exploring how that difference got produced, imposed, and preserved. The Court likewise removed historical consciousness from its federal voting rights protection in 2013 with Shelby County v. Holder, which ensured that states with a past record of racial discrimination no longer needed the presence of federal registrars at the polls. Representing what one observer viewed as the end of the Second Reconstruction, the Shelby decision opened the door for voter suppression in North Carolina and Florida in the 2016 election.
Contextualizing multiculturalism as one among many rejections of subaltern history thus reveals it to be, in large measure, just one more example of institutions behaving in observance of structural white preferences. The question is not whether to focus on culture, but rather which course of action advances institutional anti-racism as a collective aim.
Today calls to step away from “identity politics” represent implicit calls to step away from civil rights, as Marcus H. Johnson has powerfully argued. Such a move, again, merely represents an extension of older—indeed some of the oldest—segregationist politics. People often forget that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), perhaps the most critical case in setting the terms for Jim Crow, professed to be a colorblind ruling. According to Justice Henry Billings Brown, segregation was not tantamount to discrimination. “We think the enforced segregation of the races,” the Court said in a twisted logical turn, “neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of the law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws.” No special treatment for black people, in other words, even as they suffered special indignities. Jim Crow’s foundational ruling effectively stood on an “All Lives Matter” argument.
Now we are being asked to forget about race altogether. Even before Election Day wrapped up one of the most racist political campaigns in recent memory, white observers on the left, center, and right began telling us that what we had just witnessed was not about race. We were supposed to understand the hurting Heartland. Media outlets, reporters, and pundits, nursing their collective shock and groping for credibility, rolled out primitive “class vs. race” formulations. They warned the far left to “be careful with the ‘white supremacy’ label” and suggested that those who pursued “wrong-headed” “identity politics” owed middle America an apology.
It is uncertain when we will see our Third Reconstruction. I remain confident, though, that we will.
But let’s remember why Trump was able to surprise so many. One reason Trump seemed like such a long shot to liberals is that he failed to adhere to the general principles of the New Economy’s dog-whistle race politics. The Second Reconstruction brought with it fundamental revisions in how America’s political mainstream had to handle the race question. President Richard Nixon, mirroring approaches successfully deployed by Democratic mayors in Chicago and elsewhere, was forced to animate his party’s white base not with overt calls to white racists, or even a successful Southern Strategy, but with calls for “law and order,” full-throated defenses of “property rights,” and condemnations of the “welfare ethic.” These terms served as handy ways to target black populations, sometimes violently. Economic and federalist arguments could also be used to great effect. As the Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained in 1981, unaware he was being recorded:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. . . . “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.” . . . Anyway you look at it, race is going to be on the back burner.
Race on the back burner; economy, small government, and values on the front. The old, southern liberalism nationalized.
For about thirty years, tepid multiculturalism and other “colorblind” deployments of race and difference became the North Star for mainstream American politics. The charted course included civil rights organizations teaming up with corporations in the early 1980s to defend affirmative action against Ronald Reagan. Through the 1990s Bill Clinton’s folksy, symbolic blackness (and the lingering white populism in the gop) helped cement the Democratic Party’s hold on the black vote, especially as it made “colorblind” policy overtures to white voters. In response to the New Democrats, George W. Bush deployed an army of high-level black and brown surrogates and appointees to evidence the gop’s new “compassionate conservatism.” And, of course, Barack Obama’s actual blackness allowed him to openly scold his black base, to deport more than two million immigrants, all with little to no political cost. Following the Second Reconstruction, it seems, racial tolerance in general, and blackness in particular, became not just helpful but necessary for political success in America.
Then came Trump. Here was a man of questionable values, questionable conservative bona fides, and, based on his own checkered record in business, questionable understanding even of economics. Worse, it seemed, he again and again broke the discursive norms that had been greasing the wheels of American capitalism since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Because Indiana-born judge Gonzalo Curiel was “a Mexican,” Trump deemed him unqualified to adjudicate the Trump University fraud case. Because the NBC debate moderator Lester Holt was black, Trump decided he was a Democrat and thus part of the “phony system” propping up Hillary Clinton. (Holt is, in fact, a Republican.) Trump refused to be bound by the old Atwater playbook, and he won.
So, let’s just tell the story right. Throughout the campaign Trump’s base stood wealthier, not poorer, than the average voter who supported the Democrats. Exit polls showed that Clinton won more than half the votes of people who earn less than $50,000 a year. One-time Obama counties may have gone for Trump, but the mythical white millions who voted for Obama twice and then stomached a vote for Trump do not exist. The problem is rather that the two-time Obama voter—rather than vote for Clinton and, dare one say, pissed at the president himself—elected to stay home, especially if that voter was not college educated.
Which brings me to the final lesson: we need to practice our political consciousness. Class struggle requires a culture that nourishes class consciousness. Without cultural affirmations of feminism, attacks on women will not shock the conscience. The president-elect safely mocked the disabled, African Americans, and Latinos, performing his best in those areas where Americans enjoyed none of the intellectual and cultural infrastructure required to reject his brand of politics. On race specifically, our institutional priorities continue to undermine the formation of a racially literate public. You cannot topple racial injustice, sexism, or class exploitation without race, gender, or class thinking—early, often, and in public. And that requires, in place of mere “diversity,” a restoration of historical thinking.
It also requires new protections of the electoral process. The American political system remains beholden to campaign contributions, corporate lobbying, and the slave masters’ founding document, the Constitution. Every now and again we bend the system, in spite of its reluctance, into some temporarily progressive shape through legal challenges, grassroots community efforts, direct action, armed self-defense, and surreptitious subversions of everyday inhumanities. But remember: even as we try our damnedest (and we must), this will still take a while. It took nearly a century of work to achieve even the basic federal protections promised before the Nadir. Not until the March on Washington in 1963 would the country see another forceful show of solidarity between black civil rights groups and white organized labor. And not until the 1970s would African Americans reach the same number of elected or appointed officials nationwide that they once enjoyed in the South during Reconstruction.
It is uncertain when we will see our Third Reconstruction. I remain confident, though, that we will. We have been here before.
This forum is featured in Race Capitalism Justice, now available in reprint. Order your copy today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
N. D. B. Connolly
N. D. B. Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.Trump, 'hatchet man' Musk blasted for overreach: Trump’s First 100 Days - Day 17 | MSNBC Highlights
February 6, 2025President Trump and Elon Musk continue their efforts to scale back the government with buyout offers for federal employees, causing fear and confusion ahead of the Feb. 6 deadline. MSNBC’s Michael Steele and NBC News National Security and Global Affairs Reporter Dan De Luce react to a “potential counter-intelligence disaster” following reports that the CIA sent the names of recently hired employees to the White House in an unclassified email. Plus, a second federal judge blocked President Trump’s executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship.Trump’s war on DEI a cover for oligarchs planning to ‘loot the federal government,’ critics say
Donald Trump’s apparent war on DEI, undocumented immigrants, and others is a distraction from reported oligarchs and other alleged cronies planning to “loot the federal government,” Joy Reid opines on The ReidOut with Joy Reid.VIDEO:Federal agencies bar Black History Month and other 'special observances'
A number of federal agencies have banned celebrations related to MLK Jr. Day, Women's History Month and other such observances to comply with Trump's executive orders.WASHINGTON — Federal agencies on Friday rushed to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at curtailing diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The executive orders prompted a flurry of memos and emails obtained by NBC News that modified the rules for staff at intelligence agencies, in the military and across civilian departments regarding employee resource groups and the celebration of cultural awareness events.
This week, the Defense Intelligence Agency ordered a pause of all activities and events related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Juneteenth, LGBTQ Pride Month, Holocaust Remembrance Day and other "special observances" to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order, according to a memo obtained by NBC News.
The memo listed 11 observances that are now banned. It also said that all affinity groups and "employee networking groups" are immediately on pause.
The directive comes as the Trump administration has made it a top priority to go after any programs perceived to be related to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in the federal government.
When asked about the rationale for the DIA memo, a spokesperson said that agency "is working with the Department of Defense to fully implement all Executive Orders and Administration guidance in a timely manner.”
We’re looking to hear from federal government workers. If your agency has received a memo like this, please email us at tips@nbcuni.com or contact us through one of these methods.
Other U.S. intelligence agencies are also working to eliminate or suspend any activities that could be interpreted as supporting past DEI policies, multiple current and former officials said. The agencies are still trying to determine what activities or events will be prohibited, but officials are erring on the side of caution rather than risk failing to comply with the administration’s orders, the sources said.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the country’s intelligence services, recently issued written guidance to employees saying that DEI-related boards and working groups have been “curtailed” and that no official work time or work spaces should be used for DEI-related activities, according an excerpt from a memo obtained by NBC News. Future travel related to these activities also has been cancelled, the memo stated.
Pentagon leaders on Friday received a similar email mandating that, effective immediately, they may no longer dedicate official resources, including man-hours, to cultural awareness months.
Service members and civilians will still be permitted to attend these events in an unofficial capacity and outside of duty hours, the memo added.
As for the Central Intelligence Agency, a spokesperson said the agency is carrying out the executive order on scrapping DEI programs.
“CIA is complying with the Executive Order. We are laser-focused on our foreign intelligence mission,” a spokesperson said in an email.
Former intelligence officials said there was a risk that the administration’s moves to eliminate events marking Martin Luther King Day, the Holocaust or Americans’ ethnic heritage could prove counterproductive and discourage potential recruits from joining the intelligence services.
The CIA and other spy agencies for decades have sought to hire from a more diverse pool of talent to ensure the country has intelligence officers with language skills and cultural backgrounds that help improve intelligence gathering abroad.
“From an intelligence community perspective, I really think it could hurt our ability to do our job,” the former senior official said.
“We’re going to strangle off talent pipelines that were already narrow to begin with. And that’s going to deprive our intelligence community and our national security establishment of critical knowledge, talent, skills, language … that might be valuable in trying to get somebody into a foreign country,” the former official added.
On Friday afternoon, the Office of Personnel Management sent around a memo, obtained by NBC News, ordering that all references to "gender ideology" be removed by 5 p.m. across the federal government.
The memo stated that this includes removing references from all public-facing websites and social media accounts, and specifically ordered the removal of Outlook prompts that directed staff to write out their pronouns.
In line with that new memo, State Department employees have also been instructed to remove all gender-identifying pronouns from their email signatures by 5 p.m. Friday.
“The Department of State is reviewing all agency programs, contracts, and grants that promote or inculcate gender ideology, and we are removing outward facing media that does the same,” the new Under Secretary for Management Ambassador Tibor P. Nagy wrote in an email — whose subject line was "Defending Women" — reviewed by NBC News. “Bureaus have already been alerted to review trainings, forms, and plans that involve gender ideology.”
Last week, the Justice Department sent a memo to staff announcing the closure of all of its DEI programs, saying, "These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination."
The Pentagon memo on Friday barring the use of official resources for cultural awareness months echoed the same language, stating that "efforts to divide the force — to put one group ahead of another — erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution.”
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that outlined "the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and 'diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility' (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government."
A similar email went out from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services last week, notifying employees that all affinity groups, also known as employee resource groups, were "being disbanded and special observances are being canceled.”
Employee resource groups (ERGs), which exist in both the public and private sectors, are voluntary, employee-led groups for people with similar backgrounds or life experiences. Common groups include ones for Native Americans, LGBTQ people, Black employees, women and veterans, among others.
Other agencies have also ended their ERGs, including DOJ Pride, the Justice Department's LGBTQ employee resource group that has been around for 30 years.
During a press briefing Friday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to a question from NBC News about whether Trump plans to keep with tradition and sign a proclamation about Black History Month ahead of its start on Saturday.
"The president looks forward to signing a proclamation celebrating Black History Month. I actually spoke with our great staff secretary. It’s in the works of being approved, and it’s going to be ready for the president’s signature to signify the beginning of that tomorrow," Leavitt said.
Trump later signed the proclamation.
“I call upon public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities,” he wrote, calling it “an occasion to celebrate the contributions of so many black American patriots who have indelibly shaped our Nation’s history.”
Juneteenth was established as a federal holiday just four years ago, during the Biden administration. Also known as Emancipation Day, Black Independence Day and Jubilee Day, the holiday commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S.
It was the first federal holiday created since 1983, when Martin Luther King Jr. Day was established.
Andrea M. O’Neal, a former White House official who helped drive federal policies and observances behind Black History Month under President Joe Biden, said observances allow for full acknowledgement of American history.
O’Neal also said they help raise awareness about what communities are experiencing that may have a direct impact on how the federal government can help better serve them.
“This kind of rollback is demoralizing to communities who finally had a seat at the table [and] were finally acknowledged for their contributions,” O’Neal said.
“When presidents and governments decide who’s important [and] who’s not, that has downstream effects that we may not fully understand yet,” O’Neal said, adding that the changes implemented from the executive order will make people feel less comfortable at work and cause them to have lower morale, she added.
Troy Blackwell, who worked for the Department of Commerce in the Biden administration, said a big piece of DEI involves making policies and resources accessible for underserved communities.
In his final year working for the Department of Commerce, Blackwell and his team opened patent and trademark resource libraries at Hispanic-serving institutions and historically Black colleges and universities.
“I’m heartbroken to be honest,” Blackwell said. “It’s despicable what’s happening and I think it’s definitely a sign of government overreach.”
“We celebrate Black History Month knowing that there’s been a history of enslavement and Jim Crow and civil rights and what that has done to the fabric of the United States and the contributions of African Americans who have been overlooked for not decades, but centuries,” added Blackwell, who is Afro-Latino. “The literal White House that the president sits in and his team works in was built by slaves.”
Trump's inauguration happened to fall on MLK Day this year.
In a speech following his swearing-in ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, Trump acknowledged the historical significance of the holiday and spoke directly to the Black and Hispanic voters who cast a ballot for him last year.
"To the Black and Hispanic communities, I want to thank you for the tremendous outpouring of love and trust that you have shown me with your vote," he said, adding: "Today is Martin Luther King Day. And his honor — this will be a great honor. But in his honor, we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true."
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Police detain a protester at a May 3, 2024 protest at NYU. Image: Getty Images
Politics
Elections, Israel and Palestine, Trump
The Boomerang Comes Back
How the U.S.-backed war on Palestine is expanding authoritarianism at home—from Project Esther to violence at the border.
by Noura Erakat
February 5, 2025
Boston Review
[This essay is part of an Election Chronicle series in our Winter 2025 issue, Trump’s Return. Subscribe to get a copy.]
In the fallout of the election, a stream of social media content—some from passionate Harris supporters, some from lesser-evil Democratic voters, and some, presumably, from people simply lashing out, horrified and distraught at Trump’s win—took to blaming Palestinians for the outcome.
My initial fury at these statements eventually gave way to analysis. How could so many people be so callous and so wrong? The tendency to scapegoat in moments of crisis, along with pervasive anti-Palestinian racism, are surely factors, but there are larger forces at work as well. Many had seen Palestinians protesting the Democratic Party, but thanks to widespread censorship and media bias, most of them also almost certainly had not seen the stream of atrocities in Gaza that had been taking place for over a year: five-year-old Hind Rajab begging for someone to save her; the body of Sidra Hassouna split in two and hanging on a beam of a destroyed building; Sha’ban al-Dalou burned to death while attached to an IV drip in a hospital; a civilian crew in Gaza tearing through heavy stones with their bare hands to reach a young girl, wearing white tennis shoes and a green sweatsuit that her parents must have been proud to dress her in, trapped under the rubble of a bombed-out building for fifteen hours, only for her to die before they reach her.
In order to resist fascism, we have to fight it on two fronts of U.S. state violence: at home and abroad.
But beyond a lack of awareness of the vast devastation, many Americans also haven’t heard what it has to do with the United States, and with the Democratic Party in particular: the fact that, in the year following October 7, the Biden administration sent nearly $23 billion to Israel with no red lines; that it vetoed four UN Security Council resolutions demanding a ceasefire; that Secretary of State Antony Blinken ignored the U.S. government’s own determination that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza when he delivered a statement under oath to Congress last May; that the United States has violated its own laws—including the Arms Export Control Act, Section 620i of the Foreign Assistance Act, and National Security Memorandum-20—conditioning U.S. military aid to state belligerents on their compliance with U.S. and international laws of war; that the United States has undermined the authority of both the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court (ICC); and that 107 members of Congress sent a letter to the United Nations two weeks before the election threatening to withdraw U.S. funding and support for the organization if it allowed its members to unseat Israel, as the General Assembly had done with the South African apartheid regime in 1974.
Simply put, most people have no idea to what extent this genocide is being perpetrated not only by Israel but also by the United States. For a solid majority of the center-left, what is happening in Gaza is tragic but ultimately less important than the most significant existential threat: the ascendance of Trump. During the run-up to the election, the argument goes, we Palestinian and Arab Americans should have understood that resisting fascism in the United States is the primary goal and gotten in line accordingly.
But resisting fascism is our collective goal. We just know that in order to resist it, we have to fight it on two fronts of U.S. state violence: at home and abroad. Because if the United States, together with Israel, manages to disembowel the ICJ, the ICC, the UN, and a broader global order built after the Holocaust and World War II, no one is safe. The fact that Israel has committed genocide, turned humans into walking bombs in its pager attack in Lebanon, and decimated countries while the UN Security Council watches passively should concern all of us. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro warned back in December 2023, “What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.”
If only more people in the United States had taken his words seriously. During the election, the work of several initiatives, such as the Uncommitted movement and Not Another Bomb, emphasized the centrality of ending U.S. warmaking to a progressive agenda. Other efforts, like Abandon Biden/Harris, went further, highlighting the similarity between right-wing fascism and “authoritarian liberalism.” All labored to make the entwinement of domestic and foreign policy visible—but that message was drowned out by the dehumanization of Palestinians, itself underwritten by the War on Terror’s racialization of Arabs and Muslims as presumptively guilty terrorists.
It was thus unsurprising that throughout the election cycle, nearly all the mainstream liberal pundits sounding the alarm about white supremacy, jingoism, xenophobia, and political violence failed to connect these things to U.S. imperial violence. What if, rather than blaming Palestinians, Arab Americans, and American Muslims, these pundits had seen their treatment—under Biden and for decades before him—as central to the Trump-led repression looming before us?
In his searing 1950 polemic Discourse on Colonialism, Martinican writer Aimé Césaire wrote of the “boomerang effect,” whereby violence in the colonial periphery manifests itself in the colonial metropole. Hitler’s genocide of European Jews, he noted, was modeled after European rule over African and Asian colonies. (He may have had in mind the German extermination of the Nama and Herero people in Namibia during their period of colonial rule from 1884 and 1915—a period of brutality that scarcely registered in Europe while it was taking place.) Some seventy-five years later, Césaire’s point has been borne out many times over: there is no clear dividing line between a colonial power’s imperial geography and its metropole.
In the early twentieth century, when the U.S. army in the Philippines reoriented itself to address counterinsurgency and cement colonial rule over its newly conquered territories and peoples, law enforcement at home transformed itself in its image. Drawing on the new military model, police reformers revamped their departments to feature professional academies, mounted police units, surveillance, racial profiling, anticipatory policing, mapping, and weapons training. Counterinsurgency in Vietnam further militarized U.S. police, ushering SWAT teams, military-grade weapons, and a willingness to deploy disproportionate force into urban policing. At the turn of the century, the so-called War on Terror expanded presidential authority, severely curtailed civil rights, and made a mockery of the Constitution just as quickly as it did international law.
Conservative agendas continue to use Palestine as a Trojan horse.
Today we are living out the latest chapter of this story, and this time the boomerang has come hurtling back with astonishing speed. Already, the genocide has expanded authoritarianism—its U.S. architects ignoring the 84 percent of Democrats who supported a ceasefire, censoring the media, and suppressing academic freedom—as well as increased police power, with snipers on university rooftops training their weapons at unarmed protesters a frequent occurrence.
This might have been a galvanizing moment. The entwinement between state and military violence could have made more vivid how Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian racism in the United States fuels endless war abroad, and how, in turn, this endless war continues to villainize Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims. But for most, that moment of recognition has not come. Instead, abuse against Palestinians has been normalized, and harmful precedents have been established that make other vulnerable communities less safe as well.
Consider the repression that Palestinians and their allies have endured in the United States over the last year. Palestine Legal reports that in the five months after October 7, the organization received over 1,500 reports of harassment, abuse, doxing, and loss of employment—a seven-fold increase over the whole of 2020. The Council on American-Islamic Relations likewise reports that in the final quarter of 2023, it received a 178 percent increase in reports compared to the same period in 2022. And all this is to say nothing of outright violence against Palestinians, including the shooting of three Palestinian American college students in Burlington, Vermont, who were targeted for wearing keffiyehs and speaking Arabic (and which left twenty-year-old Brown University student Hisham Awartani paralyzed), and the killing of six-year-old Wadea Al-Fayoume, who was stabbed twenty-six times in his home by his seventy-one-year-old landlord.
While these crimes were not state sponsored, they are the direct fallout of the U.S. government’s complicity in ongoing genocide and its decades-old anti-terrorism laws, which, as Darryl Li has highlighted, have been constructed specifically to target Palestinians. From the first mention of terrorism in a federal statute in 1969 to the introduction of a government terrorism blacklist and the first immigration law to include terrorism as grounds for exclusion and deportation, all of these efforts historically targeted Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle for liberation more generally.
In 2001, the Bush administration shut down the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), a humanitarian organization that built orphanages, distributed food, supported schools, and provided health care to Palestinians under Israeli rule, as well as in refugee camps. The administration charged its founders with working “on behalf of Hamas” under the Patriot Act, despite the fact that the recipients of the Foundation’s grants, such as municipal Zakat committees in Hebron, Tulkarm, and Nablus had also received U.S. government aid. During the spurious 2008 trial, an anonymous witness—who turned out to be an Israeli intelligence officer—used “secret evidence” on the stand for the first time in a U.S. criminal court, a clear violation of the Sixth Amendment. He knew the HLF had terror affiliations, he argued on the stand, because he could “smell Hamas” on them—which was enough to sentence the five cofounders of the Foundation to between fifteen and sixty-five years in prison.
Once established, however, these repressive measures have had impacts far beyond Palestinians. By March 2023, Georgia police had arrested and charged forty-two activists protesting the expansion of Cop City, a $90 million militarized police training facility that requires the clear-cutting of Atlanta’s largest clear space, charging them with domestic terrorism. Six months later, Georgia’s attorney general charged five of the activists with terrorism and three of the bail fund organizers with money laundering—expanding the list of targets to include those providing the protesters legal and financial support. And in May 2024, the state legislature in Tennessee adopted HB 2348/SB 2610, which allowed the state to target other social movements with terrorism charges—primarily environmental ones, as well as those who, like Black Lives Matter, declare their solidarity with Palestinians.
In similar fashion, attacks on free speech that target Palestinians empower the right-wing agenda against discourses and programs on racial justice. In the fall of 2023, Elise Stefanik became the supposed champion against antisemitism during congressional hearings that grilled university presidents for failing to do enough to end what she called the threat of genocide of Jews by students who were protesting an actual genocide of Palestinians. Ultimately, the hearings compelled two presidents to resign, their feverish attempts to repress and punish students ultimately falling short of Stefanik’s mark.
All of this has cleared a neat path for the Trump administration, which will be all too happy to intensify the repression.
When students took it upon themselves to pressure their institutions to divest from weapons manufacturers and other industries sustaining this violence—which includes scholasticide, the killing of teachers and students and the destruction of educational infrastructure—some university presidents called on police to brutalize their students while others, like the president of UCLA, allowed outside mobs to violently attack students while the police watched. A year later, universities have hired private security firms to repress their student protests and to limit speech so much on campus as to be tantamount to theater, with free speech as the right to be heard, but not to challenge power. So far, three tenured faculty—all American citizens—have been fired or put on leave for criticizing Israel: Maura Finkelstein, Steven Thrasher, and Jodi Dean. These harsh punishments normalized the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s precedent-setting revocation of a tenure offer to Palestinian professor Steven Salaita in 2014 for his tweets criticizing Israel during its fifty-one-day onslaught of Gaza.
In January, Columbia Law Professor Katherine Franke resigned after twenty-five years of an illustrious academic career because of institutional harassment and scrutiny she endured for pointing out—correctly—that Israeli students who complete their military service and come to Columbia have “been known to harass Palestinians and other students” on campus. Most recently, NYU established that Zionism, a political ideology, is a protected class within the meaning of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—further restricting political agency and speech. Nine universities have suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine; in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to ban the group altogether.
All of this has cleared a neat path for the second Trump administration, which will be all too happy to intensify the securitization of Palestinians and the Palestinian liberation struggle for the sake of expanding police power and government repression. Even while taking credit for the ceasefire in Gaza, Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, expressed alignment with the Biden administration’s murderous Middle East policy, described the pager attack in Lebanon as movie-worthy, and framed the college protests—which Biden had condemned at every turn—as wind under Hamas’s sails:
Every time [Hamas] got the news of these antisemitic protests on our college campuses, and that Hezbollah could be coming in, and seeing calls for regime change against the democratically elected Israeli government, they thought they were winning and could continue to sacrifice their own people to turn world opinion against the Israelis.
Congress already seems to be in lockstep with this new trajectory. Weeks after Trump’s election win, a majority of the House—including fifteen Democrats—approved HR 9495, an amendment that would give Congress the authority to revoke the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit organization it accuses of having terrorist affinities, without access to the evidence or the right to due process. Robust support for the bill is predicated on its stated purpose of targeting Palestine-related activity, yet if it is adopted by the Senate, it will be used to quash broad swaths of civil society—particularly those in opposition to Trump. The bill’s ally outside of government is Project Esther, a Heritage Foundation initiative that seeks to combat antisemitism by targeting groups it identifies as part of a “Hamas Support Network,” including organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. The initiative manifests the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which includes protest of Israel and Israeli policy, at its full and most dangerous potential.
“Operation Wrath of Zion” pledges to use AI technology to identify masked protesters.
By now, it should be clear that conservative agendas continue to use Palestine as a Trojan horse. Yet the liberal establishment has not raised the alarms. Worse, they have often served as the right’s complicit partner, oblivious to the precedents that Trump is now inheriting: broader police power, unaccountable presidential power, generalized repression, and gross restrictions on speech. The vicious culture of anti-Palestinian racism they have helped normalize strengthens Trump’s insidious narrative of migrants as terrorist threats, all as part of a massive push to facilitate deportations, ramp up surveillance, and further militarize the border. Among the flurry of executive orders he signed on Inauguration Day is one promising to deport foreign nationals who “provide aid, advocacy, or support for foreign terrorists.” Just two days later, a pro-Israel group submitted a list of 100 students and 20 faculty with visas in the United States to the Trump administration urging their deportation. The administration then issued another executive order encouraging faculty, students, and administrators to surveil one another and report students who participate in pro-Palestinian protest, threatening to deport protesters who are in the United States on a visa. Meanwhile, a New York–based national defense and cyber intelligence company, Stellar Technologies, pledged to use its AI technology to help identify masked protesters—an effort it calls “Operation Wrath of Zion.”
For all these reasons, Trump’s second coming can’t be understood without turning our gaze outward, toward a broader geography of U.S. state violence. In November 2023, in between rounds of U.S.-made bombs raining down on Al Shifa Hospital, Palestinian children in Gaza organized a press conference in front of the hospital, entreating us to do what we can to save them: “We come now to shout and invite you to protect us; we want to live, we want peace. . . . we want to live as the other children live.” Under what conditions did children have to organize a press conference asking us not to let them be slaughtered? And should we be surprised that, after such gruesome crimes have been committed in our name, fascism has found fertile ground here at home? For fifteen months, Palestinians and their allies protested relentlessly and, at times, heroically, not only to stop a genocide but to salvage and preserve core humanitarian principles governing life within the United States, insisting that genocide is suicide. Surviving this next chapter demands that we see ourselves as the rest of the world sees us too.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Noura Erakat
Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.A Line-by-Line Breakdown of Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Executive Order
Almost every sentence of the order is wrong, misleading, or flagrantly unconstitutional.
Donald Trump holds a signed executive order during the 60th presidential inauguration parade at Capital One Arena in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Like a clogged sewer erupting into the streets, Donald Trump returned to office on Monday, and, as promised, unleashed his filth upon the country. In a flurry of lawless, unconstitutional, racist, bigoted, violent, and, in some cases, plainly stupid executive orders and pardons, Trump set his reign of terror in motion. The future we feared has officially arrived.
Trump’s activity is, as always, designed to keep people distracted, defensive, and demoralized. He did so much stuff in the opening hours of his junta that the media can’t process it all, and Americans can’t keep up. It will take the courts literal years to process the lawsuits against his administration based on just its first half day, and we already know that the media is a Dr. Moreau monstrosity that has the attention span of mosquitoes, the memory of goldfish, and the courage of chickens.
I cannot tell you the worst thing Trump did in his first hours—“the worst” is a subjective assessment largely based on how close you are to the people Trump would like to harm. There is, however, one executive order that attempts to nullify an entire constitutional amendment by fiat, so that is the one I have decided to focus on.
“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”—better known as the birthright citizenship executive order—attempts to cancel the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. Getting rid of constitutional amendments via executive order is new, and, for me at least, “the worst.”
Nearly every line of this order is wrong, misleading, or flagrantly unconstitutional. To appreciate the depths of racism and lawlessness embedded within it, you need to read every line. Lawyers have done that, and a lawsuit has already been filed attempting to stop the order. But I believe every single person in this country who is not a mouth-breathing racist deserves to understand just how despicable this thing is. I want you to be able to fight the racists in your family, chapter and verse, on this unmitigated piece of trash.
So allow me to present the order to you with my annotated commentary, sentence by sentence, section by section. Let’s start with the title:
“Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”
Make no mistake: This title is a nod to the “Great Replacement” theory. The implication here is that the “meaning” of what it is to be “American” is devalued if that meaning is commingled with certain kinds of immigrant blood. To “protect” the value of being an American (for white people), non-white people who were merely born here must be excluded.
*
“Section 1. Purpose. The privilege of United States citizenship is a priceless and profound gift.”
This is simply wrong. Citizenship is a privilege, but it is not a “gift.” It’s not bestowed by individual benevolent white folks when they happen to be in a good mood. Birthright citizenship is a right, one that has been enshrined in the organizing document of our country.
There is a legal process for taking away rights, but that process has nothing to do with the bigoted orders of an aging despot. Taking away the right to birthright citizenship requires nothing less than a constitutional amendment. Trump wants you to forget that by pretending that citizenship is a gift.
*
“The Fourteenth Amendment states: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’ That provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.”
Both the Dred Scott Decision and the 14th Amendment were trying to fix a fundamental flaw in the original US Constitution: The founders, in their racist wisdom, did not define “American” citizenship. At the founding, there was no such thing as a “US” citizen; instead, citizenship flowed up from the states. You were a citizen of New York or Virginia or wherever, based on the citizenship laws of that state. That meant that the circumstances of your birth could confer citizenship to you in one state, but not another.
Obviously, that meant the legal status of enslaved Africans varied by state. In some states, “free” Black people were citizens, while enslaved Black people were not. In some states, enslaved Black people became citizens when they moved to free states. In some states, citizen Black people became slaves when they crossed borders. In Dred Scott, the Supreme Court resolved the issue by declaring Black people everywhere, in every state, “not citizens.” That decision was so bad we fought a war over it.
Current Issue
February 2025 Issue
After that war, the victors wrote the 14th Amendment, which not only granted citizenship to the formerly enslaved Africans but also created this new concept, a citizen of the United States. That person enjoyed rights and privileges regardless of state lines.
Now, as Trump and his Republicans try to undo birthright citizenship, you can understand what they’re really trying to do: they’re trying to go back to the pre–Dred Scott days, and make citizenship subject to the prevailing political predilections of the era. And remember that tying citizenships to politics can lead to open war.
*
“But the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”
This is a lie. It has, literally, repeatedly been interpreted to confer citizenship universally to people born within the United States.
*
“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Consistent with this understanding, the Congress has further specified through legislation that ‘a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ is a national and citizen of the United States at birth, 8 U.S.C. 1401, generally mirroring the Fourteenth Amendment’s text.”
Trump is throwing around the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” because it’s a piece of legal jargon that most people don’t understand. He’s trying to suggest ambiguity where there is none.
To explain: There was one group of people clearly born in the United States who did not get citizenship with the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868: Native Americans. The white people who wrote the 14th Amendment were interested in giving citizenship to the humans they stole and brought here and forced to work for free; they were not interested in giving citizenship to people whose lands they hadn’t yet stolen, or people living on reservations which were not officially “subject to” the laws of United States (except the ones preventing them from getting their land back). The “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” language is there so that white (former) enslavers could continue their westward colonization and subjugation, because the Indigenous people who were about to get ethnically cleansed by our suddenly well-armed and well-trained post–Civil War armies were not going to be US citizens. Native Americans didn’t get full citizenship rights until 1924, with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act.
Moreover, everybody who lives here is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, regardless of their legal status in the country. If you don’t believe me, just try to be a person who is out of status and breaks one of our laws, and watch how quickly the “jurisdiction” of the US crawls up your ass. Claiming you are not subject to the laws of the United States while in the United States is a good way to end up in a United States prison.
*
“Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth,”
This is where Trump tries to straight-up change the Constitution without passing a constitutional amendment.
If you take the long view of human history, there are basically two ways to do automatic citizenship: birthright citizenship or citizenship by descent. Birthright citizenship (sometimes called “jus soli” by scholars, which means “rule of the land”) is how we do it in the New World: You are a citizen where you are born. Citizenship by descent (sometimes called “jus sanguinis” or “rule of the blood”) means your citizenship depends on where your parents were born. It’s mostly prevalent in the Old World.
Here’s a map that illustrates the Old/New World divide on this issue; it’s so stark that you’d think that people on opposite sides of the Atlantic never spoke to each other.
Why does the world look this way? Well, colonization and diasporas. As whites from the Old World set about raping and pillaging vast swaths of the world, it was pretty important to the colonizers that their spawn were citizens of their parents’ home country, regardless of what nation they were busy subjugating at the time they were born. Meanwhile, for the Old World countries that were colonized by whites, it was important to call their dispersed communities “citizens” of their home countries, no matter where they happened to be when their homelands broke the yoke of white oppression.
The New World does it differently because… the large majority of us are the descendants of colonizers, immigrants, or slaves. Sometimes all three. It doesn’t make sense to tie New World citizenship to blood, because most of us ain’t from here by blood if you go back far enough. The whole point of New World citizenship is that it doesn’t depend on where your parents are from; it’s based on where you are from.
But Trump and his white supremacists are obsessed with blood. Trump’s executive order tried to smuggle in a right based on blood, and that is simply a concept that does not exist in the Constitution. In this country, the only things your parents can pass on to you are money, unearned privilege, and knowledge—or (as the case may be) ignorance. Rights are not passed down by blood—except in this unconstitutional executive order.
*
(2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
This is the Kamala Harris provision. You see, Trump shouldn’t have been allowed to run for president because he violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment when he rose up in rebellion against the government he had previously sworn an oath to defend. But the Supreme Court decided to ignore the 14th Amendment for the purposes of seeing a white man get what he wanted. Here, Trump is saying that Harris shouldn’t have been able to run for president, because the very specific situation this section describes is the situation of Harris’s birth: She was born in the US to two parents who were here legally, but with temporary status.
The pettiness toward his former political rival is probably what got Trump on board, but for the broader collection of white Republicans and capitalists who support him, this provision is critical. That’s because even Republicans understand that we need immigrants in this country, not only to perform low-skilled work at exploitative wages, but also to perform highly skilled work should America still want to be a thought and innovation leader. We need immigrants for their labor and their intellectual capacity.
But once these people have contributed to America’s wealth, the white people running the joint would still like the option to throw them away. By preventing immigrants on temporary work or student visas from having American-citizen children, the Trump administration is essentially relegating them to permanent second-class status. It’s the “you can come here and enrich us, but you can’t be us” version of white supremacy. Unless, that is, they eventually choose to give the “gift” of citizenship to immigrants.
*
“Sec. 2. Policy. (a) It is the policy of the United States that no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship, or accept documents issued by State, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize United States citizenship, to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
This is the operations clause. It attempts to prevent state agencies, like the Bureau of Vital Statistics, from issuing birth certificates to the newborn children of these immigrant parents. It prevents the Social Security Administration from issuing Social Security numbers and cards. It essentially tries to make the children of immigrants legally disappear, dropping them into a limbo where their status and very existence can be forever questioned by authorities. If the executive order is allowed to take effect, we might truly never know how many people it affects, because the order interferes with basic recordkeeping.
Critically, this section also says that documents provided by some agencies in some states should not be accepted by other agencies in other states. This, my friends, is exactly what Dred Scott was all about. Trump is trying to create a class of people who may be recognized as citizens in, say, California, with all the rights and privileges thereof, but who then lose those rights when they travel to Texas. It would then allow Texas to deport those people who became noncitizens only when they crossed state lines, not unlike the way Dred Scott allegedly became a slave again the moment he went back to Missouri from Illinois.
Again, we have literally tried doing things this way before, and it led to war.*
“(b) Subsection (a) of this section shall apply only to persons who are born within the United States after 30 days from the date of this order.”
The executive order is not retroactive. It only applies going forward to new babies born in the United States.
It might be tempting to take some comfort in this, but… don’t. We all know that this executive order is just a prelude for Trump’s mass deportation policies. People whom the Trump administration will try to send away will argue that they can’t be separated from their American-born citizen children. The administration will say that these children are not “real” citizens, even though technically this order isn’t supposed to apply retroactively. The 30-day thing will not matter, as Trump’s newly pardoned brownshirt forces are forcibly deporting people from the country without due process.
But the courts will pretend it does. The second problem with this alleged 30-day waiting period is that courts, including the Supreme Court, might pretend that it is true, and thus deny standing to anybody who is trying to sue to stop the order until there is an American-born plaintiff who is directly “harmed” by it. This means we’re at least one month before a plaintiff directly harmed by this is born, or 10 months before a plaintiff conceived after this rule is born. Trump’s court might refuse to recognize a plaintiff with standing to sue over this case until the little noncitizen baby can say the word “lawyer,” and that is more than enough time for this facially unconstitutional order to do immense harm, even if the courts belatedly get around to ruling it unconstitutional.
*
“(c) Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the entitlement of other individuals, including children of lawful permanent residents, to obtain documentation of their United States citizenship.”
If the “except for Elon Musk” part of this order weren’t obvious before, it should be now. Musk’s future kids can still get citizenship, Trump wants to make that very clear, for some reason.
*
“Sec. 3. Enforcement. (a) The Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Commissioner of Social Security shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that the regulations and policies of their respective departments and agencies are consistent with this order, and that no officers, employees, or agents of their respective departments and agencies act, or forbear from acting, in any manner inconsistent with this order.”
If Trump had appointed actual American patriots to any of these positions, it’s likely they simply wouldn’t follow an unconstitutional order. Instead, he’s picked sycophants with no independence or backbone for all of these positions, so they’ll do what he tells them. Later, they’ll say they were “just following orders,” like so many Nazi apparatchiks before them.
*
“(b) The heads of all executive departments and agencies shall issue public guidance within 30 days of the date of this order regarding this order’s implementation with respect to their operations and activities.”
The “guidance” issued could make the whole monstrous order even worse. I’ll have to wait and see what the agency heads say, because I am not creative enough to anticipate how one might go about providing guidance on how to implement an unconstitutional rule.
That’s it for the law part of the executive order. The rest consists of definitions of terms and general provisions, nothing mission-critical.
On its face, this order violates the 14th Amendment, the statutes that mirror the 14th Amendment, and the Administrative Procedures Act (which prohibits “arbitrary and capricious” laws and orders such as “don’t give birth while on a student visa or else”). I’d also argue that it could violate the Equal Protection Clause, because it focuses more on the status of the mother than on the father. And it could violate the Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution if we’re in a situation where citizenship granted in a blue state is not recognized by red states.
But I wonder when the courts will get to a discussion of these issues on the merits. Because the government and Trump judges will likely begin by arguing that nobody even has standing to sue the administration over this constitutional violation. They’ll say that an immigrant who is not pregnant has no right to sue, nor does the out-of-status person who is expecting. They’ll say that states don’t have a right to sue, because they’re not “harmed” by the order. They’ll wait until an actual baby is born, and denied documentation, and then force that literal baby to sue.
In the meantime, the courts could allow a patently unconstitutional order to go into effect and watch as the white-wing media desperately tries to normalize it. They could watch as Trump’s goons attempt to “enforce” the order as he puts families and their American-citizen children on trains and sends them to camps, waiting for just the “right” plaintiff to emerge.
Even if the courts do get around to “stopping” the order, Trump controls the military. He controls the State Department and the Justice Department. He controls the Social Security Administration. I don’t have a lot of belief that he will follow a court order on this, even if the courts order him to stop.
All I can do is tell you that the order is unconstitutional, and racist, and obviously so. The people who support this order are wrong, and racist. The journalists who promote and normalize the order are wrong and racist. This order violates one of the fundamental principles of the United States, and people should react to it like it does.
Unfortunately, the order upholds another, perhaps even more fundamental principle that has always animated the American experiment: the idea that this country is for white people, and nobody else. The people who believe that, and have always believed that, are the people who hope this order succeeds.
As I keep saying, we’ve tried to do citizenship Trump’s way before. It led to war. It could again, if Trump is allowed to get away with it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/01/20/us/politics/20executive-orders-Jan6.htmlRead President Trump’s Proclamation Granting Clemency to January 6 Rioters
January 20, 2025
A PDF version of this document with embedded text is available at the link below:Download the original document (pdf)
This proclamation ends a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begins a process of national reconciliation. Acting pursuant to the grant of authority in Article Il, Section 2, of the Constitution of the United States, I do hereby: (a) commute the sentences of the following individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, to time served as of January 20, 2025:
• Stewart Rhodes
• Kelly Meggs
• Kenneth Harrelson
• Thomas Caldwell
• Jessica Watkins
• Roberto Minuta
Edward Vallejo
• David Moerschel
• Joseph Hackett
• Ethan Nordean
* Joseph Biggs
• Zachary Rehl
• Dominic Pezzola
• Jeremy Bertino(b) grant a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021; The Attorney General shall administer and effectuate the immediate issuance of certificates of pardon to all individuals described in section (b) above, and shall ensure that all individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, who are currently held in prison are released immediately. The Bureau of Prisons shall immediately implement all instructions from the Department of Justice regarding this directive. I further direct the Attorney General to pursue dismissal with preiudice to the government of all pending indictments against individuals for their conduct related to the events at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Bureau of Prisons shall immediately implement all instructions from the Department of Justice regarding this directive.
IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this twentieth day of January, in the year of our Lord two thousand twenty-five, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and forty-ninth.
