What Now?
Last week, a new report was published on the Trump administration’s handling of immigration, its signature issue.
Here’s the bottom line: “Trump’s crackdown has escalated the number of immigrants in detention and those with cases tied up in courts, but hasn’t boosted the pace of removals.”
The rate of removals has actually slowed, and not just because fewer people are crossing the border. That’s a bad look for an administration that promised the “largest deportation operation in American history.” So naturally, as the pace flagged, the number of publicity stunts increased—stunts like grabbing international students off the streets over op-eds they wrote, Kristi Noem pretending to personally jail illegal aliens while sporting hair extensions, the White House tweeting ASMR deportation videos, and so on.
The purpose of this theater is more than just deceit. While I think this is happening in other ways, I opened with immigration because it was perhaps the top issue of the November election and, for many Americans, the single most important one of our time. If you can convince people that you’re fully delivering on the biggest thing ever, you can get them to go along with—or at least look away from—other stuff that they might otherwise not support because, after all, they’re getting the biggest thing ever. That’s how this administration operates. It’s why Trump keeps floating his “gold card” that would be marketed at the wealthiest foreign billionaires, which he acknowledged in a joking-but-not-joking way could be exploited by—in his words—“oligarchs”; it’s why the White House wants to reverse a ban on the toxic, endocrine disrupting chemicals that destroy fertility and cause cancer; it’s why a president who ran on liberty and peace is busily building the new surveillance state and increasingly rattling the saber.
Because, although you did not vote for any of the above, at least you’re getting the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
The lie is the most important thing. The lie that we’re being given back our country rather than watching it be looted by a different cast of characters.
Again, this isn’t limited to immigration. You’re also seeing it play out now with the bizarre implementation of tariffs.
To be clear, tariffs can serve as a useful instrument of economic nationalism. The concern is how they are being utilized and what that might mean for the average American—who is right now discovering that any and all questions are forbidden. Indeed, questions are tantamount to treason.
On every issue, the most important thing is the lie, and around this endless lie has emerged a movement completely divorced from or hostile to reality. I spent much of my political writing career as a member of it who got a good look at the inside, and I do not hesitate to call it an enormous con that cannot be salvaged. I hear from others like myself every so often who feel the same way but would never be public about it because they’ve seen the wrath invited by honesty. I can’t blame them.
Others struggle to admit to it out of a sense that they’ve sunk too much into it or that there is no alternative. I understand this position and know people who are trying to do good in whatever ways they can.
The loudest and most reprehensible faction consists of those who know they are lying about what’s happening and insist that Trump cannot fail, only be failed. They lead mobs against critics and engage in the kind of behavior associated with spiteful far-left mutants. They take comfort in petty bigotry as a way of consoling themselves and deluding their followers. The episode that is burned into my mind is when they went after Elon Musk over his support for legal immigration.
Musk denounced them as “unrepentant racists” who should be removed from the Republican Party “root and stem,” and Trump repeatedly sided with Musk over his staunchest supporters, who seemed actively in denial of how the dynamic was unfolding. They were utterly and brutally humiliated, but their response was to declare victory and turn up the vitriol as if it were comfort food for losers who desperately needed to save face. Meanwhile, Musk went on to pick fights with impunity with MAGA populists like Steve Bannon and trade adviser Peter Navarro.
A real movement would find this sort of thing intolerable, but the right that emerged with Trump is not that. It is purely a cult of personality, and as such, it will ignore consistency and conviction until word comes from the top.
In a great twist of irony, this faction also ended up going to war over just how much bigotry, how much insanity is good for political appearances and where it should be aimed. Imagine Costin Alamariu (an aging academic who pretends to be a kind of bodybuilding fascist named “Bronze Age Pervert”) arguing with the followers of Nick Fuentes or Candace Owens over whether the blame for all our problems rests with Jews or women or those who fail to trust the plan. Even Curtis Yarvin, the philosopher king of Thielworld, seems worried about the state of things.
But these people are all part of the same organism that is rotting from the head down and poised to inflict a good deal of suffering on normal people before it is dead and buried. No matter who “wins” this fight, you lose.
The predicament is this: decades of elite hubris and neglect created the conditions that made Trump’s rise inevitable, and though he seemed a kind of populist savior, he was and is not. We’re stuck with a movement dominated by charlatans and sociopaths competing over who gets to be the leading intellectual light of a rolling dumpster fire. What now?