With President Trump’s crackdown on immigration beginning in earnest, it’s now clear that the White House has two major goals to accomplish with its anti-immigrant propaganda. They are in tension with each other. One is to depict Trump fearsomely vanquishing all those dark hordes marauding northward who no longer dare breach our border now that he’s in charge. The other is to portray a nation that—despite Trump’s unassailable strength and power—remains forever under unrelenting invasion, thus legally justifying sweeping new powers to crush the remaining invaders and other assorted enemies within.
You can see this tension playing out in the strange tweets that Karoline Leavitt, the 27-year-old White House press secretary, unleashed as she announced that Trump is now raining down thunder on migrants. “The largest massive deportation operation in history is well underway,” Leavitt gushed, enthusing about the use of “military aircraft” to remove “illegal immigrant criminals.”
The triumphant announcement also came complete with martial imagery. “President Trump is sending a strong and clear message to the entire world,” Leavitt announced in a tweet showing dejected and defeated migrants getting frog-marched onto military planes, declaring: “Deportation flights have begun.” Fox News dutifully blared forth the stunning news. Liberation is at hand!
It is only under Trump, you see, that we have begun deporting migrants on big, powerful-looking planes, and the entire world had better pay attention. Except this is all nonsense. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Counsel pointed out, the United States has been removing migrants on planes for many years, and the Biden administration, to its discredit, also drew attention to such flights. What makes the Trumpian version so galling is the suggestion that this is his innovation, and that carrying it out on military planes is something that only Trump is tough enough to undertake.
Leavitt is well known for offering comically obsequious praise for Trump, as well as for delivering the most towering of absurdities with unflappable smugness. She recently trumpeted a coming “big infrastructure announcement” from Trump, claiming he’s already “done more in less than 24 hours than his predecessor did in four years,” thus erasing Biden’s painstakingly negotiated, bipartisan, trillion-dollar infrastructure law without flinching in the slightest.
Yet this joyous feting of Trump’s power and strength as he begins his mass deportations amounts to something much darker—and a lot more telling, too.
For one thing, it’s becoming clear that whatever practical justification there is for ramping up the military presence at the border, all this martial imagery also serves a nefarious, indefensible purpose. Many of the executive orders constituting Trump’s immigration crackdown rely on the premise that we’re under “invasion”; in one case, he is claiming that this unlocks constitutional authorities to fend off the invaders that exist wholly independent of any congressional statute.
The imagery of military planes at the border, then, is not just MAGA bread-and-circuses stuff. By sustaining the impression of this “invasion,” it’s also about manufacturing a pretext for the broader public to justify the assumption of extraordinarily sweeping powers that are very likely illegal.
For another, the overall story that Trump is telling here—that the invader within is so vast and formidable that extraordinary measures are required to uproot and expel it—will not be sustainable in the real world. The supposed failure until now to deport undocumented immigrants with sufficient gusto is not actually the serious national problem that Trump and his spinners claim it is, and they will not be able to disguise this for very long.
Note that during his four years as president, Biden deported more people than Trump did during his first term. Trump and his advisers criticize Biden for deprioritizing the removals of longtime residents, and his border czar has vowed to sweep much more broadly. That was fun and games during the campaign, when no one had to think about what this would actually mean. But barely days after Trump won the election, numerous Republicans—and localities and industries in red states, from construction to food production—suddenly began suffering misgivings, letting it be known that mass removals in their communities would create major economic disruptions.
Here’s an overlooked moment that underscores the point: At a Senate hearing on Thursday, Trump’s nominee for agriculture secretary, Brooke Collins, faced persistent questioning from Democratic Senator Richard Durbin about how deportations would impact the farming and food industries. Durbin pointed out that huge numbers of people who pick our crops are undocumented.
“Can we expect this administration to be raiding farms and going after the immigrant farm workers?” he asked.
Collins hemmed and hawed, insisting that of course she fully supports Trump’s agenda of mass deportations. But then she pledged to respect the imperative of doing “everything we can to ensure that none of these farms and dairy producers are put out of business.”
In other words, mass deportations do threaten widespread economic damage. The only ways to avoid this, of course, are to not carry out removals of all undocumented immigrants, or to do it in such a way that favored industries are not targeted by them. Which constitutes an admission that ejecting undocumented immigrants entirely is a terrible idea, and that many play critical roles in our economy and society.
If that is so, why not stick to targeting serious criminals for removal, while creating more paths to legalization for the non-criminal migrant workers we need? Because the story Trump is telling must not ever be tampered with or disturbed—the undocumented population can be understood only as an invading enemy within that must be expelled at all costs.
Political theorist Thomas Zimmer recently observed that the propaganda of authoritarian leaders sometimes suffers from a deep contradiction. On the one hand, the justification for carrying out expulsions and purgings of undesirable populations—for assuming extraordinary authorities or undertaking potentially illegal actions against them—must rest on depicting them as a massive internal threat. On the other, the leader must perpetually be depicted as powerful and strong, which requires demonstrating that he is mercilessly and successfully crushing that threat. Yet that in turn requires forever finding new ways to replenish the sense of emergency the original threat was supposed to create.
The Potemkin nature of all this is neatly captured by Leavitt’s absurdities about mass deportations. All that military imagery exaggerates the scale and nature of that enemy while also sustaining the impression that only Trump has the strength to conquer it.
Yet this ruse cannot be sustained indefinitely: What happens when the deportations actually do start targeting those migrants who—by the admission of Trump’s own incoming agriculture secretary—are necessary to keep the food coming to our tables? How will Trump and his propagandists keep manufacturing the rationale for a military-style response at that point? And if we’re still under “invasion,” won’t Trump have failed to achieve the glorious pacification he promised us?
The buffoonish quality of all these follies already makes it plain: No amount of determined propaganda from the likes of Leavitt will be able to paper over these glaring contradictions forever.
