Trump wants a concentration camp nation

Most people have no idea.

In the last four months, we’ve seen an assault on government that will kill millions around the globe, destroy America’s leadership in science and research, and leave the entire nation at the whim of polluters and scammers. Yet, verily I tell you, that will be nothing compared to the shock coming if Republicans pass any version of the reconciliation budget now in the Senate. 

Because, in addition to the massive cuts to essential services like Medicaid and food stamps, this bill includes something we have never seen before in American history—something the Founders built our Constitution to avoid—a declaration of war against much of the United States.

Daniel Costa at the Economic Policy Institute notes:

The bill provides $155 billion in new immigration enforcement funding—more than five times the amount of current funding—to supercharge the ability of the Trump administration to carry out more actions like these, as well as further militarize the border and build more miles of the border wall, put immigrants in new and expanded prisons, and carry out worksite raids across the country.

Enjoy the camps?

Visualizing the current assault on cities and workplaces expanded by a multiple of five is impossible for most people, but Radley Balko—author of The Watch newsletter and the book RISE OF THE WARRIOR COP—has been trying to get the idea into people’s heads for more than a year:

The former president's vow to deport 15 million people [note: the number changes depending on Trump’s mood] is the cruelest, most illiberal, most openly authoritarian campaign promise in modern U.S. history. Oh, and it would also destroy the economy.

This purposeful detonation of fundamental American freedoms is driven by what Andrea Pitzer calls the “concentration camp tendency." She describes this tendency "as the desire to exclude those deemed undesirable from society and carry on as if they didn’t exist.”

Balko notes that for Stephen Miller, Trump’s closest advisor and our new shadow president, “Ridding the country of non-white immigrants has been a core part of his identity for his entire life.”

What Trump and Miller hope to create is a Concentration Camp Nation.

For Miller, this is about ethnic cleansing and putting “the help” in their place. For Trump, it’s about refiguring reality.

Mocking what Americans want most

The urge Trump has “to clean out” Gaza is the same urge driving this regime to create a Department of Homeland Security that will replace the FBI as our primary and largest federal law enforcement agency (possibly the largest law enforcement agency in human history).

This will have massive consequences that most Americans can’t yet conceive of, as Marcy Wheeler keeps noting:

Shifting from the FBI, which must adhere to written rules developed over decades in the wake of past abuses, to DHS, frees you from a great many strictures on how you investigate people. (This would be one effect of making ICE a bigger law enforcement agency than FBI.)

Shifting from FBI to DHS shifts you from a legalized culture to thug culture.

Trump's concentration camp tendency and Miller’s ethnic cleansing are, by nature, beyond the law. Their urges mock any desire to build a functioning immigration system, which is what the vast majority of Americans say they want. It’s about deporting moms and grandmoms and great-grandmoms, and leaving blue communities in shambles, fury, and terror as punishment for their willingness to welcome immigrants. 

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent explains:

…majorities are not ideologically hostile to the mere presence of peaceful unauthorized immigrants in this country; they just want the system to work. Yet Miller and Trump see that presence as itself posing a dire public emergency, or even a civilizational one. In this worldview, there can be no desirable pathway to lawful status here for these people, because they inherently represent a public threat—they are “poisoning” the nation’s “blood.” Making them legal wouldn’t change that. It would only make the threat they pose more insidious.

That’s why Miller is capable of tweeting that the House GOP budget bill is the “most essential piece of legislation” in “the entire Western World,” largely because it ramps up deportation resources. To him, saving the “Western World” rides on deporting all those unauthorized people, including all those “moms.”

There will be bad blood

There’s been a lot of debate about whether Trump voters “voted for THIS.” 

And there’s pretty good evidence they did:

But I still hate most debates about what people voted "for," because obviously, some voted for this. Others were cowed by propaganda, and the last 2-3% of the electorate—the voters who decide any close presidential election—are so intentionally uninformed that, for attempting to siphon out their motivations, a Ouija board is more useful than a poll.

But there are two problems with assuming 77,302,580 Americans want a concentration camp nation. 

The first is practical. These fair people thought they were voting to expel immigrants they don’t like in massive numbers from the United States. But they probably assumed it would look a lot like contemporary America, but with fewer people of color. The truth is, “mass deportations now” has been the reality in America for decades. We deport millions every year. ICE has been haunting our neighbors for all this century. What’s new here is the massive influx of cash, combined with the explicit attempt to create a lawless kidnapping machine that punishes anyone Steven Miller doesn’t like.

The second problem is strategic. Thinking ahead to elections and voters we can write off is getting way ahead of ourselves, especially considering how bad this extra $155 billion will make our unaccountable overlords. Our primary charge is to maintain equal justice under the law, so that we can have honest elections at some point. This is about mass mobilization, not polls of imaginary elections that don't even have nominees yet.

Erica Chenoweth, one of the researchers behind the 3.5% Rule, which studied resistance movements worldwide, has found that one aspect of winning movements is "the ability to get people to defect from the opponent's pillars of support."

That’s why I feel that the cry “We didn’t vote for a concentration camp nation” is a good one. Even if every Trump voter did vote for “this," that still leaves the vast majority of America, Harris voters, non-voters, and children, who didn’t. And it leaves room for those who did vote for this to at least consider that they screwed up. If we demand just immediate conversion or disappearance, we’re just becoming the monsters we face.

Who knows who knows?

One of the curses of being highly informed about the news is that we project that mindset on others, when it’s obviously not true for the vast majority of Americans who increasingly “opt out” of the news and only get information ambiently. 

And for Republicans who do key into the news, they are doused in lies, soaked in the belief that Steven Miller sold Trump who sold red America (and even Democrats in Congress who backed his border bill) that American is flooded with more than 20 million undocumented immigrants who are violent threats to “real Americans,” when evidence shows that immigrants increase public safety.

So believe them when they say they’re genuinely surprised to find that ICE, desperate to rack up numbers that back Miller’s lies, are already targeting soccer moms like Carol Hui.

The truth is that even the people who desperately wanted a Concentration Camp Nation may be shocked by what’s coming next, and for reasons that aren’t entirely admirable. See: Musk, Elon.

Trump tends to fall out with everyone who isn’t related to him by blood. His concentration camp tendency drives him to disappear anything and anyone he cannot trust to bow to him. Either you get to be JD Vance parasitically suckling his ego like a human IV of sycophancy forever, or you eventually meet Mike Pence’s fate, or worse.

Most white Americans cannot possibly conceive what a Concentration Camp Nation will look like. Nazi-loving goons may drool at the prospect of purifying the nation by turning the country into a giant camp with all of us on one side of the fence or the other. But we’re heading into a twisted future where the sickest fantasies of our sickest men are coming true. And few of us have ever experienced that reality.

“You didn’t want this” is a kind, thoughtful, and maybe too generous thing to say. But we must sell that simple notion. Because if they decide that they did want this, there may be no coming back.

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