Thomas is the single best commentator on the theology that drives these people.
Where does this end? Who is at risk? Anyone who stands in the way of the MAGA vision of purging the nation. âHe was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,â Stephen Miller lied about Kilmar Abrego Garcia last week: âThis was the right person sent to the right place.â Who cares what the law says: To the MAGA ideologues, Garcia is outside the boundaries of âreal America,â he does not â and must never â belong to the Volk, the ârealâ people. This is a core tenet of the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. âIâm still gonna call them an illegal alien,â JD Vance proclaimed last September, when he was trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio based on vile lies and conspiracy theories he was instrumental in propagating. He knew the people he was targeting were in the United States legally. Yet for blood-and-soil nationalists like Miller and Vance, there is a âHigher Truthâ that overrides all else: The âhomelandâ is under siege, overrun with enemies who âpoison the blood.â The allegiance to the âreal Americanâ homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional.
The MAGA rage wonât be confined to migrants either. A regime that so aggressively curtails and ignores fundamental rights for one group today will not hesitate to violate and suspend them for others tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow. Itâs never far from âillegal aliensâ and âalien enemiesâ to âthe enemy within.â In the MAGA imagination, America is simultaneously threatened by outsiders and by insidiously subversive forces on the inside. The âenemy withinâ â those Un-American forces of radical leftism and âglobalistâ elites â are as acutely dangerous as the invaders from without. In order to restore this declining nation to former glory, to Make America Great Again, it has as to be âpurifiedâ â the enemies have to be subjugated and purged. That is the core promise of Trumpism as a political project.
This is how the attempts to detain, deport, and disappear foreign nationals are directly connected to both the escalating attacks on universities as well as the assault on state institutions and the civil service. To the Trumpist Right, all of these institutions have been taken over by the âglobalistâ enemy within, they function as power centers for the âwokeâ elites, they fund and propagate their campaign to subvert and weaken the nation.