"Death to America"

This is the True Meaning of "MAGA"

The essence of Trump’s movement is an attack on the very concept of American citizenship. It’s the bright, red thread that runs through the entirety of its existence: from its origin in birtherism, the racist idea that there was something questionable or tainted about Barack Obama’s citizenship, to the stolen election myth, which sought to disenfranchise millions of Americans, to the attempt to end birthright citizenship by fiat through executive order, and the newly announced prioritization of denaturalization cases by the Department of Justice. A Republican congressman called for New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s denaturalization and deportation. The White House said it should be “investigated.” This is not to be taken lightly.

I say it is an attack on the concept of citizenship, not a redefinition or even a return to the pre-Reconstruction racial state, because, in the Trumpian universe, there is no agreed-upon, apolitical definition of who is granted citizenship, of who bears inalienable rights under the law. The sovereign decides who is a citizen, as it decides who is an enemy and where and when the law applies. It becomes entirely arbitrary, a prerogative grant. Citizenship is no longer a right, it is, as the Orwellian executive order PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP puts it, “a privilege,” a “priceless and profound gift.” No one can seriously argue that, if possible, Trump would not revoke and grant citizenship at will. That’s what he is already trying to do. Look at the idea of the Trump Card, where someone can buy their way into citizenship. This a further degradation of the notion of citizenship from a set of rights and duties to a transferable and revocable commodity.

The correlate in practice of the destruction of citizenship in theory is deportation to a place beyond the law: the concentration camp or worse. That is the meaning of the experiments with deporting people to El Salvador or dangerous “third countries” where they may be killed or tortured. They are, in effect, rendering people stateless. In a 1952 letter to Robert Hutchins, then director of the Fund for the Republic, Hannah Arendt wrote:

As long as mankind is nationally and territorially organized in states, a stateless person is not simply expelled from one country, native or adopted, but from all countries—none being obliged to receive and naturalize him—which means he is actually expelled from humanity. Deprivation of citizenship consequently could be counted among the crimes against humanity, and some of the worst recognized crimes in this category have in fact, and not incidentally, been preceded by mass expatriations. The state’s right of capital punishment in case of murder is minor compared with its right to denaturalization, for the criminal is judged according to the laws of the country, under which he possesses rights, and he is by no means put outside the pale of the law altogether.

Justice Earl Warren, in Trop v. Dulles agreed, calling denaturalization “a cruel and unusual punishment:

We believe, as did Chief Judge Clark in the court below, that use of denationalization as a punishment is barred by the Eighth Amendment. There may be involved no physical mistreatment, no primitive torture. There is, instead, the total destruction of the individual's status in organized society. It is a form of punishment more primitive than torture, for it destroys for the individual the political existence that was centuries in the development. The punishment strips the citizen of his status in the national and international political community. His very existence is at the sufferance of the country in which he happens to find himself. While any one country may accord him some rights and, presumably, as long as he remained in this country, he would enjoy the limited rights of an alien, no country need do so, because he is stateless. Furthermore, his enjoyment of even the limited rights of an alien might be subject to termination at any time by reason of deportation. In short, the expatriate has lost the right to have rights.

This punishment is offensive to cardinal principles for which the Constitution stands. It subjects the individual to a fate of ever-increasing fear and distress. He knows not what discriminations may be established against him, what proscriptions may be directed against him, and when and for what cause his existence in his native land may be terminated. He may be subject to banishment, a fate universally decried by civilized people. He is stateless, a condition deplored in the international community of democracies. It is no answer to suggest that all the disastrous consequences of this fate may not be brought to bear on a stateless person. The threat makes the punishment obnoxious.

From what I’ve been able to see, there’s been no discussion of the fact that the revocation of birthright citizenship would potentially make thousands of infants stateless. What would then be done with them?

It’s long been my contention that the attack on citizenship is the most serious and frightful aspect of the Trump phenomenon and the one that makes it most deserving of the epithet fascist or totalitarian. “MAGA,” in its innermost being, means “death to America.” If they successfully destroy American citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution they will have destroyed the country. We will be, all of a sudden, somewhere else. It may be called the United States of America, but it really won’t be. It won’t feel like a big cataclysm, happening all at once. It will come not with a bang but a whimper. It will be a chaotic and shambolic existence where more and more people have to scramble to ensure they have the right papers or are in the right zone. It will be stupid and laughable, a “system” not particularly hard to outwit, but unspeakably dire in its consequences if one happens to slip through a crack. And likely, for most, they will have little to worry about. Superficially, life will continue much as before. But we will be a sad shadow of that former country, at times recognizable in its old outlines, but fading fast.