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Trump wants to recreate a white America that never existed | Rebecca Solnit

As Donald Trump deteriorates and his grasp on power fades, he has been lashing out furiously at female journalists and ethnic groups, most recently Somali Americans. His insults land because of their animosity and his power, not their accuracy. Likewise, his administration’s attacks on immigrants are sloppy and driven by lies. It’s strikingly clear that the target is not individuals with criminal records. It’s anyone and everyone guilty of being brown. Native Americans with tribal identification cards, US citizens, people doing crucial work from construction to nursing, military veterans, college students, people sleeping in their own beds, small children: all kinds of residents of this country are under attack.

“ICE raids are cruel, inhumane, and do nothing to serve public safety,” declares Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor-elect. Masked thugs smashing car windows and dragging parents away from their babies, terrorizing whole swathes of the population, and interfering with the ability of schools and businesses to function does the opposite. The rounds of targeted hatred by Trump and his minions – for people from Haiti during the 2024 campaign, for people from Venezuela this spring and summer, and most recently for people from Somalia – rely on defamatory lies and insults, because the facts about these groups don’t support the hate.

This terrorizing and demonizing pretends to be in service of recreating a white America that never existed. The US when white supremacists like Trump were young was whiter, but this was never a white country. In 1776, the 13 colonies that became the United States included a significant percentage of Black and Indigenous people (some southern states were a third or more Black). When the US annexed Texas in 1844 and then in 1848 took Mexico’s whole northern half, a Spanish-speaking population was already settled across parts of what’s now the south-west and California. The first African Muslim in what is now the United States came in a Spanish expedition almost a century before the Mayflower brought its fanatical Puritans to the shores of Massachusetts in 1620.

The persecution of huge numbers of brown people and even the mass deportations will not create the white country of far-right fantasy. Los Angeles, for example is an almost 50% Latino city, and despite the ICE and border patrol outrages, arrests, imprisonments and deportations, it remains so. The city’s very name is Spanish, a reminder of who was here first. All the hatred, all the persecution, seems like the panic of racists pretending they can stop the future of this country no longer being majority white through sheer cruelty.

It’s coupled with an attack on reproductive rights that is sometimes openly intended to make white women have more babies (the US has a below-replacement rate birthrate, which is less impactful than in many other countries facing the same decline, because a young, hard-working immigrant workforce keeps things going). Of course, rather than offering the support that might make parenthood less grueling, they are attempting to realize their goals by punitive means. And it’s not working. Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker writes that JD Vance’s reproductive politics – and insults to childless women – amount to pronatalism, which “typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas”.

Likewise, CNN reports: “Reproductive rights groups and other advocacy organizations say these efforts to buttress the birth rate don’t make up for broader administration priorities aimed at cutting federal programs such as Medicaid, its related Children’s Health Insurance Program, and other initiatives that support women and children. The pro-family focus, they say, isn’t just about boosting procreation. Instead, they say, it’s being weaponized to push a conservative agenda that threatens women’s health, reproductive rights, and labor force participation.”

The anti-immigration and pronatalist policies add up to fantasies of redirecting the demographic future of this country. Both amount to, in the end, dim-witted bullying by haters inadvertently demonstrating that their claims to superiority have to be based on race and gender, because otherwise they’re incoherent idiots.

A lot of the Trump administration’s justifications don’t line up with realities and results. The attacks in the southern Caribbean target small boats not confirmed to be carrying drugs and not capable of reaching the US. Venezuela is not involved in any meaningful way in trafficking fentanyl and much less involved in cocaine trafficking than other South American countries.

“We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies,” says a new White House document. Trump and company are sentimentally committed to fossil fuel, especially coal, and are forcing various US locales to waste money on this outdated and toxic fuel while sabotaging cheaper, cleaner renewable energy. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is sabotaging public health while promoting anti-scientific schemes to control Americans’ diet.

The premise of the attacks on immigrants is that people of color who were not born in the US are intruders and threats, but from Los Angeles to Charlotte, North Carolina, and Chicago to Portland to New York, it’s the Trump administration’s violent foot soldiers with ICE and the border patrol that locals perceive as unwelcome threats and violent invaders. There is no more dramatic sign of the rejection of Trumpism than the thousands upon thousands organizing, showing up, risking bodily safety, arrest and felony charges to defend their neighbors. City after city has risen up to defend its own. All of Trump’s insults cannot change that.