It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”
“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)
Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”
As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.
During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)
“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”
Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship.
They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.
It was only a matter of time before former president Donald Trump resorted to race science to further denigrate migrants, who he believes to be “poisoning the blood” of the United States. Speaking to radio host Hugh Hewitt on Monday morning, the former president—who once described himself as a “gene believer” and has a known obsession with genetics and bloodlines—accused migrants coming to the southern border of being “criminals” and having “bad genes.”
“When you look at the things that [Vice President Kamala Harris] proposes, they’re so far off she has no clue,” Trump said. “How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers. Many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know, now a murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now. They left, they had 425,000 people come into our country that shouldn’t be here, that are criminals.” (Trump’s claims are false.)
Of course, this isn’t the first time the GOP nominee has spread overtly racist and dangerous lies about immigrants. Immigrant-hating has become his entire brand and ending all forms of immigration his main fixation. But Trump’s latest rant comes as a reminder of one of his lifelong guiding beliefs: that some people are innately better than others. It also begs the question of what Trump might be willing to do to the people he believes to have “bad genes.”
As my colleague David Corn wrote in this magazine in 2016, Trump has repeatedly claimed that success and moneymaking are contingent on genetics.
During a campaign rally in Minnesota in 2020, Trump addressed a crowd of overwhelmingly white supporters in a county that had voted to reject refugee resettlements, “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (On the occasion, he also explicitly referenced the discredited eugenics “racehorse theory” embraced by Nazis and white supremacists that selective breeding can produce genetic superiority.)
“More than anything else,” Trump penned in his The Art of the Deal, “I think deal-making is an ability you’re born with. It’s in the genes.” In 1988, he told Oprah Winfrey, “you have to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes.”
Trump and his running mate JD Vance don’t disguise their contempt for immigrants, especially those of color. When pressed, they double down on it. Recently, Trump injected into his immigration platform policy the notion of “remigration,” a proposal favored by the European far-right to forcefully repatriate or mass deport non-ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship.
They couldn’t be any clearer about their ideals and desire to make America a “homeland” where, presumably, only those they consider to have the right genetic composition are welcome.
Over the weekend, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to elaborate on how he would “end the migrant invasion of America.” The candidate for president—who has repeatedly vowed to conduct the largest mass deportation campaign in US history—exhumed the usual laundry list: He would “stop all migrant flights,” do away with the Biden administration’s Customs and Border Protection mobile app, and halt refugee resettlement. None of these proposals are new or surprising coming from the Trump campaign.
But one part of the GOP nominee’s weekend post stood out. “[We will] return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration),” Trump wrote. Former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller reposted it, saying “THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!”
What did Trump and Miller mean by “remigration”? Even seasoned immigration policy analysts had to look the term up:
Trump here uses the phrase "remigration." I was unfamiliar with the term, so I googled it.
Wikipedia describes it as a "far-right and Identitarian political concept" largely used to describe the mass deportation of non-white immigrants and their descendants from Europe. https://t.co/i8K5yK0sPkpic.twitter.com/vECWjE1DVK
“Remigration,” as a 2019 article about the rise of extreme anti-immigrantlanguage in Europe from the Associated Press explains, is the “chilling notion of returning immigrants to their native lands in what amounts to a soft-style ethnic cleansing.” The word stands in for a policy that entails the forced repatriation or mass expulsion of non–ethnically European immigrants and their descendants, regardless of citizenship. With little fanfare, Trump seems to be hinting at bringing an even more radical idea into his immigration proposals (to Miller’s all-capped cheers) that goes further than the mass deportation of the undocumented population.
“He knows what he is doing,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a professor of history who studies fascism and authoritarianism, said of Trump’s statement. “He chooses his words carefully.”
Thevalue-neutral term “remigration” has been employed in anodyne ways—for instance, in the context of Jews returning to Germany after World War II. But the word has been co-opted by far-right groups, mainly in European nations, and is synonymous with these movements now.
In France, one-time far-right presidential candidate Éric Zemmour proposed the creation of a “remigration ministry.” Speaking at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels this April, Zemmour denounced the “Islamization of the continent” as an existential threat to the European civilization.
Most notably, “remigration” has gained a stronghold in Germany. In 2023, a jury of linguists in the country elected remigration the “non-word” of the year for its “deliberately ideologically” appropriation as an euphemism for the forced expulsion of people to “achieve cultural hegemony and ethnic homogeneity.”
“The seemingly harmless term remigration is used by the ethnic nationalists of the [Alternative for Germany] AfD [party] and the Identitarian Movement to conceal their true intentions: the deportation of all people with supposedly the wrong skin color or origin, even if they are German citizens,” one guest juror said.
Last November, members of the far-right AfD, neo-Nazis, and businesspeople reportedly gathered in Potsdam to discuss plans for mass deportation, including of “unassimilated citizens” with non-German ethnic backgrounds. The man behind a master plan to relocate asylum seekers, foreigners with lawful status, and some Germans of foreign origin to a so-called “model state” in North Africa was the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner. (Even French far-right leader Marine Le Pen took issue with the secret meeting, expressing “total disagreement” with the remigration discussions.)
More recently, according to localreports, an AfD candidate in Stuttgart campaigned with the slogan “Rapid remigration creates living space,” a nod to the concept of Lebensraum used by the Nazis to justify the genocidal expansion into Eastern Europe.
Trump’s mention of remigration didn’t go unnoticed. Sellner, who has been barred from entering Germany and the United Kingdom and had his visa-free travel permit canceled by US authorities in 2019 over suspected links to the Christchurch shooter, appeared to celebrate on X the former US president’s “calls for remigration” as a victory.
According to Cécile Alduy, a French expert on the political uses of language at Stanford University whose works touches on issues of nationhood and the mythology of national and ethnic identities, remigration is “flagship far-right lexicon.” The word, which is the same in French, is a neologism, she explained in an email. “The far right is fond of creating new words, such as ‘immigrationism’ or ‘remigration’ or ‘francocide’ or the concept of ‘big replacement’ because they argue that only them can see the new reality, and that this new reality needs a new vocabulary to shake people’s mind into more awareness of the dangers at play.”
As I’ve written about here, anti-immigrant sentiment has been at the center of the revival of the right globally, including in the United States. At the National Conservatism conference in Washington, DC, this summer, speakers repeated some of the very beliefs animating the notion of remigration, from an emphasis on assimilation to the characterization of multiculturalism as “anti-Western,” and calls to “decolonize America.” One anti-immigration hardliner floated the idea to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The use of this kind of language fits the context of an escalation in dangerous rhetoric about immigrants in the United States. Lately, Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, has played a key role in disseminating false rumors about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, abducting and eating pets, which Trump repeated on the debate stage. The lies have resulted in bomb threats and unleashed fear in the community. (They are also seemingly deliberate. When pressed by CNN’s Dana Bash on why he continues to perpetuate the debunked claims, Vance said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”)
If given the opportunity, Trump and his acolytes could turn hateful discourse into expulsion policies targeting all immigrants. Last week, the former president said he would start the mass deportation operations in Springfield and Colorado’s Aurora, two cities caught in the vortex of right-wing anti-immigrant conspiracy theories. Most Haitian migrants in the United States have received legal status under the Temporary Protected Status program or a Biden administration humanitarian parole initiative and are authorized to work.
But that would mean little to Miller, who has boasted of a potential second Trump presidency’s move to take away people’s citizenship. “We started a new denaturalization program under Trump,” he posted on X in October of last year. “In 2025, expect it to be turbocharged.”
Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University who studies international migration, noted on the social media platform, “It is not about who should get US citizenship—it is about some US citizens illegitimizing other US citizens.”
A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The allegations were part of a broader effort against Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections.
Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”
The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.
While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”
The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president of Tenet Media.
The indictment alleges that the RT officials and Founders 1 and 2 “also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators (“Commentator-I” and “Commentator-2″), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” Dave Rubin has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, while Tim Pool has 1.37 million.
The indictment indicates that even some of the people working at Tenet found their content heavy-handed. On February 15 of this year, Afanasyeva, using the name Helena Shudra, shared a video in a company Discord channel of what the indictment calls “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia.” While he’s not named in the indictment, it clearly matches Tucker Carlson, who toured such a grocery store, declaring himself slackjawed in wonder at how nice it was.
“Later that day,” the indictment adds, “Producer-I privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: ‘They want me to post this’—referencing the video that Afanasyeva posted—but ‘it just feels like overt shilling.’ Founder-2 replied that Founder-I ‘thinks we should put it out there.’ Producer-I acquiesced, responding, ‘alright I’ll put it out tomorrow.'”
Tenet’s recent content on sites like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok has been heavily larded with critical commentary about Kamala Harris. Conservative political commentator and documented plagiarist Benny Johnson, for instance, recently starred in a video about her “empty words.”
The allegations against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering, were part of a broader effort against what US authorities allege were Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had seized 32 internet domains used in what they called “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.”
At an Aspen Institute event on Wednesday afternoon, a DOJ official, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the Russians charged in the case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.”
One of the last things Tenet posted on their social media sites before the indictment was unsealed concerned—ironically enough—a government employee accused of secretly acting as a foreign agent. Tenet posted a video of Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who has been charged with using her position to benefit the Chinese government. Tenet seemed to suggest that a few words Sun offered on a video call endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion measures were part of an alleged foreign-backed messaging plot.
“Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America?” a tweet from Tenet read.
A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The allegations were part of a broader effort against Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections.
Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”
The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.
While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”
The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president of Tenet Media.
The indictment alleges that the RT officials and Founders 1 and 2 “also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators (“Commentator-I” and “Commentator-2″), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” Dave Rubin has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, while Tim Pool has 1.37 million.
The indictment indicates that even some of the people working at Tenet found their content heavy-handed. On February 15 of this year, Afanasyeva, using the name Helena Shudra, shared a video in a company Discord channel of what the indictment calls “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia.” While he’s not named in the indictment, it clearly matches Tucker Carlson, who toured such a grocery store, declaring himself slackjawed in wonder at how nice it was.
“Later that day,” the indictment adds, “Producer-I privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: ‘They want me to post this’—referencing the video that Afanasyeva posted—but ‘it just feels like overt shilling.’ Founder-2 replied that Founder-I ‘thinks we should put it out there.’ Producer-I acquiesced, responding, ‘alright I’ll put it out tomorrow.'”
Tenet’s recent content on sites like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok has been heavily larded with critical commentary about Kamala Harris. Conservative political commentator and documented plagiarist Benny Johnson, for instance, recently starred in a video about her “empty words.”
The allegations against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering, were part of a broader effort against what US authorities allege were Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had seized 32 internet domains used in what they called “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.”
At an Aspen Institute event on Wednesday afternoon, a DOJ official, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the Russians charged in the case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.”
One of the last things Tenet posted on their social media sites before the indictment was unsealed concerned—ironically enough—a government employee accused of secretly acting as a foreign agent. Tenet posted a video of Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who has been charged with using her position to benefit the Chinese government. Tenet seemed to suggest that a few words Sun offered on a video call endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion measures were part of an alleged foreign-backed messaging plot.
“Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America?” a tweet from Tenet read.
Five years ago, the first National Conservatism conference—a gathering on the right to propose a more populist version of conservatism—was held at the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, DC.
The event, organized by the then-nascent Edmund Burke Foundation, drew rising stars of the New Right: Sen. John Hawley (R-Mo.), a clean-shaven JD Vance, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, and tech billionaire (and eventual backer of Vance’s run for Congress) Peter Thiel. The coalition convened to push a new ideology. They hoped to create a conservative ethos “inextricably tied to the idea of the nation” and an “intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”
In a taxonomy of young conservatives, Sam Adler-Bell in the New Republicpointed out that these NatCons (as they’re called) are among a variety of alternative ideas popping up to intellectualize Trumpism. But, in recent years, they have taken on a larger cache. New York Times columnist David Brooks, dismayed by the conference’s rise, would in 2021 call NatCon attendees the “terrifying future of the American right.”
During his opening remarks at that first conference, organizer David Brog invoked a recurring theme throughout the event—the dilution of the essence of the American nation. “We give no aid to our immigrants,” Brog said, “when we permit the erosion of the very culture that motivated them to move here in the first place.” Brog’s statement could be generously interpreted as charitable to immigrants, but it veiled a belief that was, and is still, at the heart of national conservatives’ pitch: Immigration is to blame for the fall of the Western world. It has become a source of weakness and an existential threat to the social fabric holding countries like the United States together.
To national conservatives, immigrants seem to hold no value unless fully assimilated. And no one drove that point home more forcefully at the inaugural conference than Amy Wax, a controversial University of Pennsylvania law professor, who made a “cultural case for limited immigration.” Conservatives, she offered, should push for an approach that preserves the country’s identity as a “Western and First World nation” and considers the “practical difficulties of importing large numbers of people from backwards states.”
In building a framework for the future of the Republican Party rooted in nationalism, Vance and others are essentially saying: the nation is not an idea but our people.
That meant adopting a “cultural-distance nationalism” that embraces the vision “that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites.” Wax argued that Donald Trump was right to question why the United States would want immigrants from “shithole countries.” (He was referring to Haiti, El Salvador, and nations in Africa.) The celebration of diversity, she concluded, “means that we lose some of these norms…that make our life what it is.”
National Conservatism began as an effort to intellectually retrofit Trumpism with a coherent framework. Today, the annual conference previews the direction of thought on the right in the United States and abroad. The most recent edition, which happened in downtown DC in early July, assembled a handful of Republican lawmakers such as senators Rick Scott of Florida and Utah’s Mike Lee, a failed presidential contestant supportive of Trump (Vivek Ramaswamy), Hungarian emissaries, and a constellation of right-wing groups plotting the next conservative administration.
“National conservatives started out as a thoughtful intellectual movement,” says Geoffrey Kabaservice, a political analyst and author of Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party, who has attended several national conservatism conferences over the years. “As time goes on, they’ve taken more and more the characteristics of a tribe.”
Their “big tent” elite movement rejects the laissez-faire economic tradition of the past and faults a “cosmopolitan” regime with the unraveling of the American “way of life.” They repudiate imperialism and globalism and wish for a muscular government that stands for the traditional values of family and Christianity. But the one reigning conviction bounding US conservatives and their international counterparts appears to be an inflated, when not outright fabricated, fear that immigration equals doom—be it from cultural change or the Great Replacement.
The halls and stage of the fourth National Conservatism conference in the US capital reeked of jubilant and, at times, vengeful confidence. “This is the first conservative conference in memory where we can look around at our country and the world and say, we’re winning,” Rachel Bovard, vice president of programs at the MAGA Conservative Partnership Institute, said. “National conservatism is the only kind of conservatism there is,” the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts declared.
The largely youthful looking, groomed men in attendance were told that the woke radical left, fake news media, corrupt ruling elites, and anti-white, anti-male, anti-Christian social justice warriors destroying the American way of life in a totalitarian fashion were being found out. Manhood is under attack and progressives are brainwashing and forcibly changing the sex of children, while imposing a “group quota regime”—and finally, this group gathered to fight back. All this had been done with the acquiescence of spineless mainstream Republicans and the legacy right who seem unaware of a brewing “Cold Civil War,” as Tom Klingenstein of the Claremont Institute put it. No more. Here comes the New Right.
For all the “owning the libs” discourse, theattacks on so-called gender ideology,the harangues against identity politics, and the warnings of the ever-present specter of neo-Marxism, the gathered “army of spirited counterrevolutionaries”—powered by nitro cold brew provided by the American Moment, an organization recruiting and training conservatives to work in Washington—at the Capital Hilton hotel rallied themselves most fervently around anti-immigrant sentiment.
The threat as they perceive it takes many forms. In the words of Stephen Miller, Trump’s former senior adviser on all things immigration, it is a border being invaded by millions of would-be Democratic “illegal voters” and “the world’s fugitives, the world’s predators, the world’s rapists and murderers.” For Mark Krikorian, from the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, it is vulnerable asylum seekers.
“Where the national conservatism movement has made the most progress, not just here, but I think overseas as well is the recognition that the real threat to American democracy it’s certainly not Donald Trump, it’s not even some foreign dictator who doesn’t like America or our values,” JD Vance said during a dinner. “The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more. That is the threat to American democracy.”
Never mind the fact that the long-term prospects of declining birth rates, a rallying cry for Vance, and shrinking population call exactly for more immigration, not less. The Congressional Budget Office projects that starting in 2040 net immigration will account for all population growth in the United States. But for Vance, the idea here is not actually about population decline as much as who is declining. As Margaret Talbot recently wrote in the New Yorker, Vance is more pronatalism than pro-family. “And pronatalism, as it’s been developing lately in certain conservative circles,” she notes, “typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.”
Vance made a populist economic and cultural argument for curbing immigration, which he said “has made our societies poorer, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.” It is the cause of lower wages for American workers, spikes in housing prices, and crowded emergency rooms, he has claimed without evidence. “The country has simply taken in too many, too quickly,” Vance posted on X in May, “and unless we fix it the United States won’t exist.”
To that end, the New Right, and Vance, have been working to define what the “nation” means in common parlance.
For a long time, it has been said that “America is an idea.” Joe Biden repeated the line in his statement to the country after withdrawing from the 2024 presidential race; telling viewers that the US is “an idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant.” Former House Speaker Paul Ryan once said, “America is the only nation founded on an idea, not on an identity.” But national conservatives want to move past the “myth” of a propositional nation based on universal principles of freedom and equality.
“I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” said Trump’s former head of ICE.
This country, “Never Trumper” turned vice presidential candidate Vance said during his speeches at the National Conservatism conference and later at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, “is not just an idea,” but “a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” It is a homeland. In building a framework for the future of the Republican Party rooted in nationalism, Vance and others are essentially saying: the nation is our people.
“Commitments to abstract principles or institutions are simply less capable of inspiring a feeling of belonging and a strong sense of identity than appeals to a shared history, a shared culture, a shared religion or ethnicity, and sometimes a shared race,” says Rogers Smith, a University of Pennsylvania scholar of American political thought. “We’ve had those kinds of appeals throughout American history.” He cites as an example the rise of nativism in the mid-1800s in response to the increased arrival of poor Irish and German immigrants.
But Vance and others within the national conservatism movement today, Smith explains, associate with new conservative thinkers who go further. “They don’t just say that you need a sense of identity that doesn’t rest on an idea alone,” Smith notes. “They say the ideas of the American founding were bad ideas.” He adds: “It scares me to death. I think it appeals to some of the worst features of American society.”
The fact that the “conservative movement is leaning into this, fueling it, is no surprise,” says Janelle Wong, a University of Maryland professor who researches race, immigration, and political mobilization. “Those who view or agree with the belief that God intended America to be a new promised land where European Christians could create a society that could be an example to the rest of the world—that’s ethnic Christian nationalism—agree with the great replacement theory rhetoric.” Sixty percent of Republicans said they believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” in a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. “We’re talking about something that has become relatively mainstream among conservatives,” Wong says.
National conservatives’ reverie of immigrants as the downfall of the West is so powerful that it calls for the harshest of responses. The asylum system, Krikorian, from the anti-immigration think-tank, said at NatCon, represents a “surrender of sovereignty” and a reframing of “immigration as a right rather than a privilege.”His solution? To have the United States withdraw its longstanding commitment to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, the Convention Against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Later, in his speech, he toyed with a plan similar to one proposed in the United Kingdom, in which asylum seekers would be sent to Rwanda. “All kinds of countries,” he told the crowd “would be willing to take our money to host a small number of illegal immigrants.”
It was like this throughout my time at the conference. Another speaker advocated for doing away with the commonly held distinction between legal immigration as positive and unlawful immigration as negative, suggesting ending certain categories of work visas and the diversity visa program. “Please replace us, just do it legally,” Kevin Lynn, executive director of the deceptively named Progressives for Immigration Reform, said mockingly. He also suggested a screening of tourists to prevent potential “anchor babies.”
Theo Wold, who served in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice and on domestic policy issues, took it even further. He called out the experiment of “massive importation” of immigrants to the United States, saying it is “unfair to millions of Americans who have been pushed aside for the arrival of millions of foreign nationals.” The only sustainable form of immigration, Wold added, comes with assimilation. (Wold bemoaned that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs discourages “Americanization” efforts.) “Multiculturalism is, at its core, an anti-Western philosophy,” he said. “Disunion is its expressed goal. It’s time not just to end mass immigration, but to reverse it. It’s time to decolonize America.”
“The real threat to American democracy is that American voters keep on voting for less immigration and our politicians keep on rewarding us with more,” said JD Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president.
This is the intellectual foundation of Donald Trump’s mass deportation plans, which are shared by the Republican National Committee’s official 2024 policy platform and were cheered on by RNC attendees carrying “Mass Deportation Now” signs. If elected, Trump and his aides want to pursue sweeping removal operations regardless of due process and build sprawling detention camps.
Speaking at the National Conservatism conference, Tom Homan, former acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, told the audience he was ready to lead the deportation campaign: “Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” he proudly said to a round of applause. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.”
At times, the bubbling rage against immigrants was palpable. During the Q&A portion of the border discussion with Krikorian, Wold, Homan, and others, a woman approached the mic to shout at the panelists, urging them to confirm her suspicion that immigrants were being purposefully brought into the country to be turned into Democratic voters, a baseless claim given credence by Republicans, who recently passed a law in the House requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. When the panelists didn’t give her the exact answer she was looking for, the woman got increasingly aggrieved. At a different session, after a speaker posed a rhetorical question about what’s the biggest threat facing the country, someone in the audience angrily yelled, “Illegals!”
“There’s a lot of speculation that the kind of conservatism we see nowadays is in some sense a resurgence of the Old Right and that it’s coming along with those xenophobic attitudes, explicitly Christian nationalist attitudes, a sense of valorization of America as a people—and largely Eurocentric people—rather than America as a creedal nation,” Kabaservice says. “I think what you’re seeing is one end of a cycle within American conservatism. It’s not clear that this is the future of American conservatism going forward. But it certainly seems to be until such a time that Trumpism ceases to be the main operating force on the conservative movement and the GOP.”
He recalls Ronald Reagan’s famous 1989 farewell address to the nation. In it, Reagan talks about America as a “shining city on the hill” and “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Kabaservice says, “It’s very odd for those of us who’ve lived long enough to remember Reagan to see how there’s almost no trace of that kind of attitude in today’s populist Republican Party.”
Top image: Mother Jones illustration; Carol Guzy/ZUMA; Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty (2)
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