Okay… so there are two things going on in here, and they’re both awful, but they deserve to be considered separately.
The
first: “they should be deported.” As an early sponsor to the Birther
movement and wholehearted embracer of the revival of white nationalism,
Trump shares a deep and unexamined conviction that nonwhite people
cannot *really* be *real* Americans. Any mechanism (like being born
here) that allows them to claim that status is outrageous trickery, any
documentation that claims otherwise must be lies or forgery.
The
second: Immortan Trump spend his entire adulthood in an environment
where if anyone earned his displeasure for any reason, he could make
them effectively disappear from his field of view, instantly and
forever, by firing them. He retains the conviction that if people do
things he doesn’t like, he can just get rid of them, even as he took
over this office. That is why his administration has had such ridiculous
churn. That is why he doesn’t seem to understand why the former cronies
he burned have gone to Mueller and made plea bargains. Why are they
still walking around talking? He fired them! Don’t they understand
they’re supposed to cease to exist?
I suppose we should be
grateful of the smallness of imagination that has not, at this point,
escalated from termination of employment to termination of actual
existence. But there it is: Immortan Trump seems to genuinely believe
that he can fire american citizens from being citizens if they displease him. He seems to think that citizenship, like employment, is something he can give or withhold at will.
The
fact that this is not in truth a function of the American presidency
has proven a bit of a hurdle for he and his team to overcome, but boy oh
boy, they’re already trying. That’s what’s behind the committees to
revoke green card and immigration status decisions made years, DECADES
ago. This is the intersection of the belief that nonwhite people cannot
really be citizens and also that citizenship is subject to his
displeasure. This is Immortan Trump’s genuine belief that he can just
make them go away by firing them from America.
So I have to lay
this out as an entirely serious, serious question: if the Trump
administration continues without checks on its power, if he continues
past the 2018 midterms and possibly even the 2020 general, what exactly would stop them from continuing to work on a loophole to allow him to strip citizenship at will?
Dama Cherepaha 