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)
GOP vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was slammed this week when a video of a 2021 Fox News appearance emerged in which he smeared Vice President Kamala Harris:He described her as being one of a “bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” Vance faced an onslaught of bad press, as many commentators—including Harris’ step-daughter, Taylor Swift fans, Democratic officials, actor Jennifer Aniston, and several conservative women pundits—decried his comment.
Yet Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, might have had an easy way of dismissing the criticism, for not so long ago, while speaking to a group of conservatives, he blamed the negative media coverage he often received on “childless” reporters.
A newly uncovered video shows J.D. Vance didn't just go after Kamala Harris as a "childless cat lady." At the 2021 event, he said he got bad press because most journalists are "unhappy," "miserable," and "angry" because they are "childless adults."
It turns out that his remark about Harris was not a one-off soundbite. This dig was part of a larger schtick that Vance has deployed to explain the challenges faced by the conservative movement, including derogatory stories in the media. In 2021, Vance presented the full pitch when he spoke at a conference outside Washington, DC, organized by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a rightwing outfit co-founded by William F. Buckley Jr. to promote conservative thought on college campuses. During this talk, Vance said he had been victimized by childless journalists. But first he noted that the conservative movement was screwed:
We have lost every single major cultural instiution in this country—Big Finance, Big Tech, Wall Street, the biggest corporations, the universities, the media, and the government. There is not a single institution in this country that conservatives currently control. But there’s one of them, just one that we might have a chance of actually controlling in the future, and that’s the consitutional republic that our founders gave us. We are never going to take Facebook, Amazon, Apple and turn them into conservative institutions. We are never going take the universities and turn them into conservative institutions… We might just be able to control the democratic institutions in this country… This is a raw fact of cynical politics. If we’re not willing to use the power given to us in the American constitutional republic, we’re going to lose this country.
To achieve that control, he said, right-wingers needed to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.” He added: “The rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing the left has done in this country.”
Vance blasted the “next generation” of Democratic leaders—Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—for not having children. (Harris is stepmother to the two children from her husband’s previous marriage; Buttigieg adopted twins in 2021.) Vance ranted that that the Democratic Party had “become controlled by people who don’t have children” and that “the leaders of our country don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring.” He howled, “Not a single one of them actually has any physical commitment to the future of this country.”
He then focused his attack on the media:
It’s honestly true of lot of folks in our press and in our media. Very often I will read a [negative] story about me….and I’ll think a little bit about the people who wrote those stories, and what you find consistently is that many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults. Let’s just be honest about it. Because, look, the elite model—the American dream to the elites—is get as much credentials as you can, get as much money as you can, get the most prestigious job, and that’s where you’re going to find you self-worth. But I have to be honest with you. Most of our mainstream reporters are not impressive enough to find a lot of self-meaning in their jobs. They’re just not good enough at it.
So it’s not just politicians who are to be dismissed because they have no kids; it’s journalists, too. Vance went on:
What society has built its entire civilization—the flow of information, the leaders of its country, political and governmental and also corporate—around completely childless adults? It’s never happened. This is a new thing in American life, probably a new thing in world history. It’s not good. It’s not healthy. You see the obsessive, weird almost humiliating aggressive posture of our media and you wonder how could these people be so miserable and unhappy. Well, the answer is because they don’t have any kids. Kids are the ultimate ways that we find… self-meaning in life.
Vance bemoaned low birth-rates in the United States, noting this was a “civilizational crisis.” He praised Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban for providing loans to newly married couples that are forgiven once they have children. He also proposed that parents be given more voting power than non-parents—a remark that has received attention in recent days.
When Vance dissed Harris as a “childless cat lady,” he was not speaking off the cuff. This runs deep for him. The right, as he sees it, has been outmaneuvered by the left on various fronts, and its only target of opportunity is the government. To win that battle, conservatives must target Democrats as foes of the family. And if the media don’t give Vance or his allies good coverage, well, you know why: reporters are wallowing in self-loathing because they’re not changing diapers, carpooling kids to soccer games, or worrying about college tuition.
Vance likes to pose as a big thinker, but this is a weird and simplistic way to see the world: dividing it into haves and have-nots regarding children. And it seems that many, it not most, elected officials, CEOs, and reporters are parents. (FYI, I have two children.) Still, Vance is relying on a skewed view of reality, as he draws up his master plan for the right. At least this distortion can help him dismiss any criticism from the media.
During his acceptance speech at the Republican convention last week, Sen. J.D. Vance, the GOP vice presidential candidate, praised Donald Trump’s call for “unity.” But this year, Vance endorsed a new book co-written by a far-right conspiracy-monger that calls progressives “unhumans” and claims they are waging an “Irregular Communist Revolution” against American civilization.
The book, Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), was written by Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec. Posobiec is a well-known alt-right agitator and conservative media personality who promoted the bonkers Pizzagate conspiracy theory. Lisec is a professional ghostwriter. And their book professes to be a history of communist and leftist revolutionary abuses over the decades—but with a twist. They claim, “For as long as there have been beauty and truth, love and life, there have also been the ugly liars who hate and kill.” And these “people of anti-civilization” have always gone by different names: communists, socialists, leftists, and progressives. The pair contend these folks—be they the Bolsheviks of Russia or the BLM activists of this decade—are better called “unhumans.”
The book is a far-right declaration of war that accuses conservatives of not understanding that the left cares only about one thing: revolution.
“With power, unhumans undo civilization itself,” Posobiec and Lisec write. “They undo order. They undo the basic bonds of society that make communities and nations possible. They destroy the human rights of life, liberty, and property—and undo their own humanity in the process by fully embracing nihilism, cynicism, and envy.”
It’s a hard-edged message. The foes of conservatism are not merely misguided souls pushing the wrong policies but people who seek to annihilate civilization. They “rob” and “kill,” Posobiec and Lisec maintain: “They don’t believe what they say. They don’t care about winning debates. They don’t even want equality. They just want an excuse to destroy everything. They want an excuse to destroy you.”
Vance apparently found this Manichean view worthy of his endorsement, and he provided a blurb that Posobiec and Lisec have used to peddle their volume:
In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through HR [Human Resources], college campuses, and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people. In Unhumans, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec reveal their plans and show us what to do to fight back.
The book (with a foreword written by Steve Bannon) is a far-right declaration of war that accuses conservatives of not understanding that the left cares only about one thing: revolution to achieve total control. The unhumans aim to “kill the people who have more” than they do. As they put it, “On a base level, unhumans seek the death of the successful and the desecration of the beautiful.” They decry the far left atrocities of the past (the French Revolution and the communist revolutions in Russia, China, and elsewhere) and claim the same malignant force is shaping the present, noting that the “chief institutions of consensus-making” in today’s society “are controlled by radicals and infiltrated by unhumans.” The book comes across as modern-day McCarthyism: This dark menace has infiltrated nooks and crannies across America, from the boardroom to the classroom to even churches. No surprise, Posobiec and Lisec have plenty of praise for Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
In their view, the dangerous unhumans are everywhere. The Civil Rights movement? Mounted by unhumans. Critics of hate speech? Unhumans. The Black Lives Matter protests? Organized by unhumans. In fact, they compare the BLM protests of 2020 to the terror of the French Revolution, noting, “There is no way to reason with those who manipulate the have-nots en masse to loot and to shoot. They simply hate those who are good-looking and successful.” (Yes, they wrote that.)
Vance’s thumbs-up to Unhumans is an indicator of how deep his roots are within the conspiratorial alt-right.
Vance’s thumbs-up to Unhumans is an indicator of how deep his roots are within the conspiratorial alt-right. The book features the conservative movement’s paranoid allegations about Big Tech being in league with leftists to help pave the way for a fundamental reshaping of society. “The terrible truth is that there is a distinct revolutionary movement we are witnessing in the modern-day West,” the pair assert. And they have a fancy name for it: “The Irregular Communist Revolution.” Wokeness, of course, is a major element of this.
And this bring us to the noble counterrevolution: January 6, 2021. Posobiec, who was part of the fraudulent Stop the Steal movement, and Lisec insist that the riot at the US Capitol was a “lawfare trap” sprung to “destroy” Trump’s followers and “make them an example to any other Republicans who want to get uppity in the future.” They contend all was calm on Capitol Hill until guards “fired on the peaceful crowd with nonlethal munitions and flash-bangs.” They write, “It was all a trap,” and the “insurrection hoax was used to begin a purge of Trump supporters from the military and from public life.” The rioters were “well-meaning patriots.”
Posobiec and Lisec repeat many of the falsehoods of the tin-foil right, including the claim that Trump had pre-authorized 10,000 National Guard troops and that assistance had been rejected. “There was indeed an insurrection on January 6, 2021—against President Trump and his supporters,” they proclaim.
Finally, the pair argue that the right must adopt extreme and underhanded measures to defeat the unhumans: “Our study of history has brought us to this conclusion: Democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans. It is time to stop playing by rules they won’t.” This means state governors, county sheriffs, and district attorneys must wage crusades against the unhumans. Elon Musk’s war on political correctness must be supported. Unhumans in education and media must be publicly named and shamed. Law enforcement in red areas should target antifa, BLM, and NGOs affiliated with billionaire George Soros.
Does Vance believe that Democrats and progressives are part of a centuries-long march of unhumans looking to destroy civilization? Does he believe an “Irregular Communist Revolution” is currently being waged in America?
Vance has echoed Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was rigged and that the January 6 insurrectionists were unjustly prosecuted. He has also said that had he been vice president that day he would have recognized the phony Trump electors from states where Trump lost. But does he also believe that Democrats and progressives are part of a centuries-long march of unhumans looking to destroy civilization? Does he believe that an “Irregular Communist Revolution” is currently being waged in America and that conservatives ought to not follow the rules in combatting this supposed threat?
I asked the Trump-Vance campaignthese questions and whether Vance read the book before giving it a thumb’s up. It did not respond.
Nevertheless, Vance opted to boost Unhumans. Considering Posobiec’s notoriety, Vance could have guessed that this book contained extreme notions.
The book has also been extolled by Donald Trump Jr. (“teaches us how…to save the West”), Michael Flynn (“exposes their battle plans and offers a fifth-generation warfare system to fight back and win”), and Tucker Carlson (“Jack Posobiec sees the big picture and isn’t afraid to describe it”). A publicist for Lisec has used Vance’s endorsement of the work to whip up media interest in the book and secure interviews for Lisec.
With Unhumans, Posobiec and Lisec are attempting to dress up the right’s long-running demonization of liberals and progressives with warped history and a heaping of fancy jargon, lumping all left-of-center action into a paranoid brew that depicts the right’s political foes as diabolical monsters seeking to obliterate all that is good within the civilized world. Vance’s approval of this dreck is yet another indicator of how this politician who once compared Trump to Hitler has come to embrace the extremism of the Trumpian far right.
On Monday morning, less than 24 hours after President Joe Biden announced his exit from the 2024 presidential race and anointed Vice President Kamala Harris as his heir apparent, far-right influencers took to social media to hurl racial epithets at the first mixed-race, female presidential candidate in history.
Here’s a sampling:
“The leading Democrat presidential candidate’s mother was named Shyamala Gopalan,” Stew Peters, a former bounty hunter and current live streamer, posted to his 620,000 followers. “That should be enough for disqualification.” In recent months, Peters has ampedup his vitriol against Indians and Americans of Indian descent.
Andrew Torba, the CEO of the far-right media platform Gab, singled out a potential running mate for Harris, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish. Torba referred to Shapiro as a “demon” in a post to his 400,000 followers on X.
Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist “groyper” influencer, was bi-partisan in his post on X to 377,000 followers, “If Trump had been assassinated last week, the presidential election would be between Nikki Haley and Kamala Harris…Two nonwhite liberal women who could never win a national primary by popular vote. What a nightmare.”
To his 169,000 followers on X, Auron MacIntrye, a pundit on the far-right media platform Blaze, warned, “They’re literally going to spend the next few months running the DEI candidate and calling everyone who opposes her sexist Hitler.”
Adding his voice to the chorus was self-appointed prophet Lance Wallnau, a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic pastors who claim that God speaks to them. In a broadcast that the extremist watchdog group Right Wing Watch captured, Wallnau called Harris “the spirit of Jezebel in a way that will be even more ominous than Hillary because she’ll bring a racial component and she’s younger.” In this, he was referring to the notion that the Biblical character Jezebel is the embodiment of a false prophet.
As Media Matters has reported, a subset of far-right pundits alsohas retooled the “birther” conspiracy theory that former president Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States and applied it to Harris. “Is Kamala Harris eligible to be president under the US Constitution’s “Citizenship Clause?” mused Tom Fitton, president of the rightwing activist group Judicial Watch, to his 2.6 million followers on X.
So far, following President Biden’s endorsement of Harris to replace him as the Democratic presidential nominee, she is the frontrunner, raking in record amounts of campaign contributions. It’s probably safe to say that if she secures the official party nomination, the racist attacks will likely show no signs of abating.
This story was originally published byGristand is reproduced here as part of the Climate Deskcollaboration.
As delegates arrived at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee earlier this week to officially nominate former president Donald Trump as their 2024 candidate, a right-wing policy think tank held an all-day event nearby. The Heritage Foundation, a key sponsor of the convention and a group that has been influencing Republican presidential policy since the 1980s, gathered its supporters to tout Project 2025, a 900-plus-page policy blueprint that seeks to fundamentally restructure the federal government.
Dozens of conservative groups contributed to Project 2025, which recommends changes that would touch every aspect of American life and transform federal agencies—from the Department of Defense to the Department of Interior to the Federal Reserve. Although it has largely garnered attention for its proposed crackdowns on human rights and individual liberties, the blueprint would also undermine the country’s extensive network of environmental and climate policies and alter the future of American fossil fuel production, climate action, and environmental justice.
“This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically…dismantle the government in service of private industry.”
Under President Joe Biden’s direction, the majority of the federal government’s vast system of departments, agencies, and commissions have belatedly undertaken the arduous task of incorporating climate change into their operations and procedures. Two summers ago, Biden also signed the Inflation Reduction Act, the biggest climate spending law in U.S. history with the potential to help drive greenhouse gas emissions down 42 percent below 2005 levels.
Project 2025 seeks to undo much of that progress by slashing funding for government programs across the board, weakening federal oversight and policymaking capabilities, rolling back legislation passed during Biden’s first term, and eliminating career personnel. The policy changes it suggests—which include executive orders that Trump could implement single-handedly, regulatory changes by federal agencies, and legislation that would require congressional approval—would make it extremely difficult for the United States to fulfill the climate goals it has committed to under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
“It’s real bad,” said David Willett, senior vice president of communications for the environmental advocacy group the League of Environmental Voters. “This is a real plan, by people who have been in the government, for how to systematically take over, take away rights and freedoms, and dismantle the government in service of private industry.”
However, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration contributed to Project 2025, and policy experts and environmental advocates fear Project 2025 will play an influential role in shaping GOP policy if Trump is reelected in November. Some of the blueprint’s recommendations are echoed in the Republican National Convention’s official party platform, and Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts says he is “good friends” with Trump’s new running mate, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio. Previous Heritage Foundation roadmaps have successfully dictated presidential agendas; 64 percent of the policy recommendations the foundation put out in 2016 had been implemented or considered under Trump one year into his term. The Heritage Foundation declined to provide a comment for this story.
The Heritage Foundation welcomes attendees to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 2024.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images via Grist
Broadly speaking, Project 2025 proposals aim to scale down the federal government and empower states. The document calls for “unleashing all of America’s energy resources” by eliminating federal restrictions on fossil fuel drilling on public lands, curtailing federal investments in renewable energy technologies, and easing environmental permitting restrictions and procedures for new fossil fuel projects such as power plants. “What’s been designed here is a project that ensures a fossil fuel agenda, both in the literal and figurative sense,” said Craig Segall, the vice president of the climate-oriented political advocacy group Evergreen Action.
Within the Department of Energy, offices dedicated to clean energy research and implementation would be eliminated, and energy efficiency guidelines and requirements for household appliances would be scrapped. The environmental oversight capacities of the Department of the Interior and the Environmental Protection Agency would be curbed significantly or eliminated altogether, preventing these agencies from tracking methane emissions, managing environmental pollutants and chemicals, and conducting climate change research.
“There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.”
In addition to these major overhauls, Project 2025 advocates for getting rid of smaller and lesser-known federal programs and statutes that safeguard public health and environmental justice. It recommends eliminating the Endangerment Finding—the legal mechanism that requires the EPA to curb emissions and air pollutants from vehicles and power plants, among other industries, under the Clean Air Act. It also recommends axing government efforts to assess the social cost of carbon, or the damage each additional ton of carbon emitted causes. And it seeks to prevent agencies from assessing the “co-benefits,” or the knock-on positive health impacts, of their policies, such as better air quality.
“When you think about who is going to be hit the hardest by pollution, whether it’s conventional air water and soil pollution or climate change, it is very often low-income communities and communities of color,” said Rachel Cleetus, the policy director with the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. “The undercutting of these kinds of protections is going to have a disproportionate impact on these very same communities.”
Other proposals would wreak havoc on the nation’s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. Project 2025 suggests eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service housed therein and replacing those organizations with private companies. The blueprint appears to leave the National Hurricane Center intact, saying the data it collects should be “presented neutrally, without adjustments intended to support any one side in the climate debate.”
But the National Hurricane Center pulls much of its data from the National Weather Service, as do most other private weather service companies, and eliminating public weather data could devastate Americans’ access to accurate weather forecasts. “It’s preposterous,” said Rob Moore, a policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Action Fund. “There’s no problem that’s getting addressed with this solution, this is a solution in search of some problem.”
“You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build.”
The document also advocates moving the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which marshals federal disaster response, out from under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, where it has been housed for more than 20 years, and into the Department of the Interior or the Department of Transportation. “All of the agencies within the Department of Interior are federal land management agencies that own lots of land and manage those resources on behalf of the federal government,” Moore said. “Why would you put FEMA there? I can’t even fathom why that is a starting point.”
The blueprint recommends eliminating the National Flood Insurance Program and moving flood insurance to private insurers. That notion skates right over the fact that the federal program was initially established because private insurers found that it was economically unfeasible to insure the nation’s flood-prone homes—long before climate change began wreaking havoc on the insurance market.
Despite the alarming implications of most of Project 2025’s climate-related proposals, it also recommends a small number of policies that climate experts said are worth considering. Its authors call for shifting the costs of natural disasters from the federal government to states. That’s not a bad conversation to have, Moore pointed out. “I think there’s people within FEMA who feel the same way,” he said.
The federal government currently shoulders at least 75 percent of the costs of national disaster recovery, paving the way for development and rebuilding in risky areas. “You are disincentivizing states and local governments from making wise decisions about where and house to build because they know the federal government is going to pick up the tab for whatever mistake they make,” Moore said.
Quillan Robinson, a senior advisor with ConservAmerica who has worked with Republicans in Washington, DC, on crafting emissions policies, was heartened by the authors’ call for an end to what they termed “unfair bias against the nuclear industry.” Nuclear energy is a reliable source of carbon-free energy, but it has been plagued by security and public health concerns, as well as staunch opposition from some environmental activists. “We know it’s a crucial technology for decarbonization,” Robinson said, noting that there’s growing bipartisan interest in the energy source among lawmakers in Congress.
An analysis conducted by the United Kingdom-based Carbon Brief found that a Trump presidency would lead to 400 billion metric tons of additional emissions in the U.S. by 2030—the emissions output of the European Union and Japan combined.
Above all else, Segall, from Evergreen Action, is worried about the effect Project 2025 would have on the personnel who make up the federal government. Much of the way the administrative state works is safeguarded in the minds of career staff who pass their knowledge on to the next cadre of federal workers. When this institutional knowledge is curbed, as it was by budget cuts and hostile management during Trump’s first term, the government loses crucial information that helps it run. The personnel “scatter,” he said, disrupts bottom-line operations and grinds the government to a halt.
Although Project 2025’s proposals are radical, Segall said that its effect on public servants would echo a pattern that has been playing out for decades. “This is a common theme in Republican administrations dating back to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan,” he said. “What you do is you break the government, make it very hard for the government to function, and then you loudly announce that the government can’t do anything.”
In February, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, fresh out of a landslide reelection victory, was welcomed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with a standing ovation. “You’re a true leader,” an audience member shouted as he took the stage and tried to talk over cheers and cries of “We love you, papa.”
He warned the CPAC crowd: “Dark forces are already taking over your country. You may not see it yet, but it’s already happening.”
Bukele, who has fashioned himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” and a“Philosopher King,” has become a darling of US conservatives because of his iron fist rulings and draconian crackdown on crime and gangs. After a trip to El Salvador in 2023, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) praised Bukele and the country as a “bright spot” in the region. And just last month, Tucker Carlson attended Bukele’s inauguration alongside Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Donald Trump Jr.
“Nayib Bukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results,” Gaetz posted on X. “He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.”
.@nayibbukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results.
He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.
But perhaps all this adulation has gone too far in the eyes of another leader who can do no wrong by conservatives. During his speech on the last night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Donald Trump took an unexpected jab at Bukele, with whom he cultivated a friendly relationship while in office.
While repeating his racist rants about an “invasion” at the border, Trump said crime rates were going up in the United States because certain countries are “taking their criminals and they’re putting them” here.
Especially bizarre given the fact that the two had a good relationship during Trump’s first term and, more to the point, that conservative Republicans have been celebrating Bukele for his recent crackdown on crime. https://t.co/lnS3kWlplJ
“A certain country, and I happen to like the president of that country very much, but he’s been getting great publicity because he’s a wonderful shepherd of the country,” Trump explained without explicitly naming Bukele, and then continued: “He says how well the country’s doing because their crime rate is down. And he said he’s training all of these rough people…But then I realize he’s not training them; he’s sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States. And he’s different in that he doesn’t say that.”
Trump then punched harder: “He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job.” He immediately followed the criticism of Bukele with a renewed pledge to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
In what appears to be a response to Trump’s speech, Bukele posted on X: “Taking the high road.”
It should go without saying that Trump’s suggestion that El Salvador is “exporting” criminal actors to the United States is false. It is a fact, however, that Bukele has been successful at bringing down crime rates in a country once known as the murder capital of the world. He did so by instituting a “state of exception” and indiscriminately arresting thousands of people without regard for due process, while silencing the press, amidst what international groups decry as widespread human rights violations worse than during the country’s civil war.
Whether Trump’s remarks reflect a threat to his ego or something else, they likely expose diplomatic short-sightedness. If re-elected in November, the GOP nominee and his future administration will have no choice but to work with the president of El Salvador on some of the very issues Trump and the party purport to care about, chief among them migration and drug flows.
As president, Trump entered deals with the governments of El Salvador—as well as Guatemala and Honduras—to push asylum seekers to request protection in those countries before coming to the United States. The Biden administration subsequently rescinded these so-called “safe third country” agreements. If he wants to continue such cooperation as president, this is an odd way to say so by Trump.
In February, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, fresh out of a landslide reelection victory, was welcomed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) with a standing ovation. “You’re a true leader,” an audience member shouted as he took the stage and tried to talk over cheers and cries of “We love you, papa.”
He warned the CPAC crowd: “Dark forces are already taking over your country. You may not see it yet, but it’s already happening.”
Bukele, who has fashioned himself as the “world’s coolest dictator” and a“Philosopher King,” has become a darling of US conservatives because of his iron fist rulings and draconian crackdown on crime and gangs. After a trip to El Salvador in 2023, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) praised Bukele and the country as a “bright spot” in the region. And just last month, Tucker Carlson attended Bukele’s inauguration alongside Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), and Donald Trump Jr.
“Nayib Bukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results,” Gaetz posted on X. “He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.”
.@nayibbukele locks up the gangs, throws out the corrupt judges, unapologetically embraces God, and rebukes globalism with facts and results.
He is beloved by his people, and an inspiration to the Western World.
But perhaps all this adulation has gone too far in the eyes of another leader who can do no wrong by conservatives. During his speech on the last night of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Donald Trump took an unexpected jab at Bukele, with whom he cultivated a friendly relationship while in office.
While repeating his racist rants about an “invasion” at the border, Trump said crime rates were going up in the United States because certain countries are “taking their criminals and they’re putting them” here.
Especially bizarre given the fact that the two had a good relationship during Trump’s first term and, more to the point, that conservative Republicans have been celebrating Bukele for his recent crackdown on crime. https://t.co/lnS3kWlplJ
“A certain country, and I happen to like the president of that country very much, but he’s been getting great publicity because he’s a wonderful shepherd of the country,” Trump explained without explicitly naming Bukele, and then continued: “He says how well the country’s doing because their crime rate is down. And he said he’s training all of these rough people…But then I realize he’s not training them; he’s sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States. And he’s different in that he doesn’t say that.”
Trump then punched harder: “He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job.” He immediately followed the criticism of Bukele with a renewed pledge to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
In what appears to be a response to Trump’s speech, Bukele posted on X: “Taking the high road.”
It should go without saying that Trump’s suggestion that El Salvador is “exporting” criminal actors to the United States is false. It is a fact, however, that Bukele has been successful at bringing down crime rates in a country once known as the murder capital of the world. He did so by instituting a “state of exception” and indiscriminately arresting thousands of people without regard for due process, while silencing the press, amidst what international groups decry as widespread human rights violations worse than during the country’s civil war.
Whether Trump’s remarks reflect a threat to his ego or something else, they likely expose diplomatic short-sightedness. If re-elected in November, the GOP nominee and his future administration will have no choice but to work with the president of El Salvador on some of the very issues Trump and the party purport to care about, chief among them migration and drug flows.
As president, Trump entered deals with the governments of El Salvador—as well as Guatemala and Honduras—to push asylum seekers to request protection in those countries before coming to the United States. The Biden administration subsequently rescinded these so-called “safe third country” agreements. If he wants to continue such cooperation as president, this is an odd way to say so by Trump.
It didn’t take long for the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at arally in Pennsylvania to galvanize right-wing politicians and supporters of former far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. About a month before the election in 2018, Bolsonaro, then the frontrunner, was stabbed on the campaign trail. While Trump seems to have recovered from the shot in the ear, his Brazilian counterpart had to undergo a colostomy and several abdominal surgeries in the aftermath of the stabbing.
The incident with Bolsonaro has lessons for how the attempted assassination of Trump could affect this year’s US election. In Brazil afterward, false theories spread—both on the left and the right—of either a staged attack or a purposeful attempt to kill a dangerous threat to the establishment. Critics softened rheotric. Right-wing actors blamed the media for instigating the attack. And the discussion about Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic politics became notably more complex.
After the Trump news, Brazilians on the right were quick to see the similarities and decried the shooting as part of a systematic persecution against conservatives.
On X, Eduardo Bolsonaro, a congressman and the third son of the one-time Brazilian president, shared a photo montage of a bloodied Trump and a pained Bolsonaro. “Trust me: he is already elected,” he wrote in English. “We have experience with a situation like that, we know the enemy—and you too.”
Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, the eldest son, also chimed in, blaming the left: “They tried to kill Trump, they tried to kill Bolsonaro, but the (extreme) right is the one accused of being violent. You may not like Trump or Bolsonaro, but ask yourself: why did they want to kill them?” A debunked video dubbed in Portuguese with a supposed message from Trump to Bolsonaro said, “They tried to do the same thing to me as they did to you.”
Primeiro o humilharam Rotularam de tudo Tentaram prendê-lo Agora tentaram matá-lo!
Impossível não relembrar da facada em @jairbolsonaro durante a campanha eleitoral de 2018 feita por um ex-membro do PSOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade).
When asked about the shooting, Bolsonaro suggested “only conservatives suffer attacks.” Echoing talking points from some US Christian Nationalist groups, Bolsonaro said it was “a miracle from heaven” that Trump “was saved by a matter of a few centimeters,” just like it was a miracle that he survived in 2018. Calling the Republican nominee the “biggest world leader of the moment,” Bolsonaro, who has been barred from running for office until 2030, posted, “See you at the inauguration.”
Earlier this year, the police confiscated Bolsonaro’s passport as part of a sweeping search-and-seizure operation linked to an ongoing federal investigation in Brazil—overseen by the Supreme Court—into Bolsonaro and his allies’ alleged coup-like efforts to overturn the results of the 2022 elections. Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva condemned the attack as a loss for democracy.
“All Brazilians instantly thought of the knife attack that propelled Bolsonaro to victory in 2018.”
As my colleague David Corn wrote the shooting has triggered claims that Democrats and President Joe Biden are to blame for political violence, with GOP Rep. Mike Collins of Georgia going so far as to say that Biden should be charged with “inciting an assassination.” Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s pick for vice president, said the Biden campaign’s rhetoric that Trump is “an authoritarian fascist” led to the attempted assassination. (There have been no reports indicating the motive of the shooter at the Pennsylvania Trump rally. In a statement, President Biden said, “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America.”)
The shooting also resurfaced false theories, from both sides of the political spectrum, about the attack against Bolsonaro six years ago. In September 2018, Adélio Bispo, who had previously been a member of a left-wing party, stabbed Bolsonaro in the abdomen. Although police investigations concluded that the perpetrator, who was arrested on the spot, acted alone, Bolsonaro and his supporters insisted that the stabbing had been ordered by someone and tried to blame it on the left. At the time, Bolsonaro called the left “aggressive,” saying they “have tried to eliminate their opponents no matter how.” His supporters have continued to use the stabbing to cultivate an image of Bolsonaro as a “political martyr.”
Meanwhile, some on the left raised doubts about the incident, suggesting it had been staged and calling it a “fake stabbing.” After Saturday, André Janones, one of Lula’s allies in Congress, joked about Bolsonaro having “taught” Trump how to fake an attack and questioned the seriousness of the attempted assassination, mentioning the fact that Trump asked for his shoes amidst the chaos. “At least this time they remembered to provide the ‘blood,'” he posted on X. In response, a far-right congressman aligned with Bolsonaro has vowed to send a letter to the US Embassy requesting the cancelation of Janones’ US visa.
The impact of the assassination attempt against Trump on the presidential race remains to be seen. But there could be hints in what happened with Bolsonaro. Some political analysts in Brazil believe that staying away from the public stage during recovery ultimately helped the far-right Brazilian candidate insulate himself from fiercer criticism and potential debate confrontations. A voter intention poll bythe Economist from that time shows a rise in support for Bolsonaro and a decline for the opponent Fernando Haddad, from the Worker’s Party, after September.
— François Valentin (@Valen10Francois) July 13, 2024
Some say Saturday’s shooting could have a similar effect on Trump. “All Brazilians instantly thought of the knife attack that propelled Bolsonaro to victory in 2018,” historian Thiago Krause said. “This is going to give Trump a major boost and it will further radicalize his base.”
The shooting also seems to be renewing the Brazilian far-right’s victimhood narrative as they reel from the electoral loss and Bolsonaro’s mounting legal troubles. What many experts do seem to agree on is the real threat of escalating political violence leading up to elections, in both Brazil and the United States.
Speaking to a crowd in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, President Joe Biden made an impassioned plea to voters with a message that largely centered on Donald Trump’s failings—and the threat of another term under his predecessor.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025. As my colleague Inae Oh reported earlier this month, the former president claimed, incredibly, that he knew “nothing about” it. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. A subsequent review by CNN found that “at least 140” people who’ve worked for Trump were involved in the effort.
“Project 2025 is run and paid for by top Trump people,” Biden emphasized on Friday. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he added. “It’s not a joke. It’s time to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”
You can read more about the document and its threat to democracy here.
Speaking to a crowd in Detroit, Michigan, on Friday, President Joe Biden made an impassioned plea to voters with a message that largely centered on Donald Trump’s failings—and the threat of another term under his predecessor.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025. As my colleague Inae Oh reported earlier this month, the former president claimed, incredibly, that he knew “nothing about” it. “I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” he wrote on Truth Social. A subsequent review by CNN found that “at least 140” people who’ve worked for Trump were involved in the effort.
“Project 2025 is run and paid for by top Trump people,” Biden emphasized on Friday. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he added. “It’s not a joke. It’s time to stop treating politics like entertainment and reality TV.”
You can read more about the document and its threat to democracy here.
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