“Nation” Justice Correspondent Elie Mystal said there is an easy reason to explain President Donald Trump’s list of weird, counterproductive actions over the last few weeks.
Mystal pointed to reports that the Trump administration is considering proposals to “radically reshape the U.S. refugee system, denying entry to Black and brown refugees the world over while opening up the borders for white people from South Africa and Europe who claim they are being politically persecuted.”
Trump is also planning to slash the number of refugees admitted into the country each year to 7,500, down from 125,000, and he is willing to staunch the flow of migrants despite the hard consequences in factories and farms across the nation as employers search frantically for labor.
“Apparently, those few spots are now reserved for white people who espouse Nazi beliefs, as both Trump and Vance have made a point of defending neo-Nazis in Germany and have been apparently making plans to bring them over here,” Mystal said.
But none of this is surprising to anybody who has done the work of actually listening to what Trump and his MAGA supporters have been talking about for years, Mystal added.
“The Trump administration is an openly white supremacist regime, and they’ve been acting like it, in both word and deed, since he returned to office,” he said. “These people are terrified of the browning of America, terrified that white folks will lose their numeric majority in this country in the coming decades, and terrified of the declining white birth rate.”
Trying to flood the border with white immigrants fits neatly with “bombing boats full of innocent brown people, authorizing Gestapo-style tactics by ICE, taking away birthright citizenship from people actually born here, sending in the military to police brown cities, eviscerating the voting rights of non-white people, and trying to turn white women into brood mothers through the revocation of their reproductive rights,” Mystal said. “If you believe that America exists for the benefit and glory of white folks, and if you believe that non-white folks don’t ‘deserve’ to be here unless they are working to increase the profits of white people, then every single thing the Trump administration is doing makes sense. It’s how you resurrect white supremacist rule over this nation if white supremacy is your one true calling.”
Mystal insists he has not lost his “capacity to be horrified by any of it.” He’s just used to hearing about it.
“This is just what majorities of white folks do. This is what majorities of white folks have always done whenever their power is left unchecked. And the only reason they’re afraid of losing their majority is that they assume other people will do to them what they’ve done to everybody else, just as soon as we get a chance,” Mystal said. “We won’t, of course. Because we’re better than that.”
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