The Former President's Ambition for a Predominantly White Nation Is a Historical Fiction

As Donald Trump's influence wanes and his public demeanor becomes more erratic, there has been an escalation in vitriolic attacks aimed at women in media and racial minorities, with Somali Americans as a recent focal point. The impact of these insults stems from their malice and his platform, not their factual accuracy. In a parallel manner, the government's actions against immigrants are poorly executed and driven by misinformation. It is abundantly clear that the goal extends beyond targeting those who have committed crimes. The true target is people of color.

From Native Americans carrying tribal IDs to naturalized US citizens, individuals performing critical jobs in building sites and hospitals to those who served, college students, people in their own homes, and very young children: a wide array of the country's inhabitants are being threatened.

"Immigration enforcement raids are cruel, unjust and achieve nothing for community security," asserts a prominent New York City official. Scenes featuring officers concealing their faces breaking car glass and separating parents from children, terrorizing entire communities and disrupting schools and businesses, achieves the opposite effect.

These waves of calculated hatred—focusing on Haitians during the election, Venezuelan migrants this spring, and most recently Somali Americans—rely extensively on libelous lies and insults. The reason is simple: the actual facts about these communities do not justify the animosity.

The Imaginary White Nation Versus Actual History

The strategy of frightening and vilifying purports to aim at recreating a homogeneously white America which is a fiction. Although America had a larger white population in the mid-20th century, it never constituted a purely white nation. At the nation's founding, the original thirteen colonies contained a substantial percentage of Black and Indigenous peoples—certain states in the South were over one-third Black.

Following American expansion, taking Texas in the 1840s and acquiring northern Mexico in 1848, it incorporated a large community of Hispanic settlers already living across what is now the Southwestern U.S. and California. Historical records show the first African Muslim in this land arrived with a Spanish expedition almost one hundred years before the Mayflower English Puritans reached the shores of New England in 1620.

Demographic Realities Against Coercive Fantasies

The persecution of vast numbers of people of color and attempts at large-scale expulsion cannot fabricate the all-white nation of extremist imagination. A city like Los Angeles, for instance, is nearly half Latino, and regardless of aggressive enforcement, arrests, and deportations, its character persists. Its name itself is Spanish, an ongoing testament of who was there first.

All this hatred and persecution resembles the panic of racists attempting to believe they can stop the coming changes of a country no longer majority-white through sheer brutality.

It is coupled with an attack on abortion access that is, sometimes, explicitly designed to encourage white women to have more children. The argument points to a below-replacement birthrate in the US, a phenomenon less severe than in other countries because of a hard-working population of immigrant laborers that sustains the economy. Yet, rather than providing the social support that could ease the burdens of parenthood, the approach is punitive and coercive.

An noted writer notes that the reproductive politics of certain political figures—along with insults aimed at women without children—constitute a form of pronatalism. This philosophy "typically merges worries about declining birth rates with opposition to immigration and anti-women's rights ideas."

In a similar vein, reporting indicates that "efforts to bolster the fertility rate do not compensate for wider administrative priorities aimed at slashing government assistance initiatives like healthcare for the poor and children's health insurance. This focus on families is not just for encouraging procreation. Instead, it is being weaponized to push a right-wing political program that threatens the health of women, reproductive rights, and economic participation."

Incoherent Policies and Public Rejection

The combination of anti-immigrant and pronatalist policies represent an attempt to forcibly alter the country's population future. Ultimately, both amount to foolish bullying by individuals filled with hatred who unintentionally demonstrate that their assertions of being better must be based on skin color and sex; absent these categories, their positions devolve into meaningless idiocy.

A lot of the reasoning offered by the Trump team does not match up with observable realities and actual outcomes. For example, maritime attacks in the southern Caribbean often target small vessels not confirmed to be transporting drugs and not able of making it to the United States. Similarly, Venezuela's role in fentanyl trafficking is minimal, and its involvement with cocaine is far less than that of neighboring countries on the continent.

The administration's stance extends to environmental policy, with a dismissal of "climate change ideology" and "Net Zero goals." An emotional attachment to coal and oil, especially coal mining, resulting in measures that force communities to invest in outdated and polluting power sources while undermining affordable, clean alternatives. Concurrently, health officials have advanced unscientific nutritional plans while weakening general public health safeguards.

The core premise of the anti-immigrant offensive is that people of color born abroad are threatening outsiders. However, across the nation—in cities like L.A. and Charlotte, from Chicago to Portland—it is the administration's own agents, the ICE and Border Patrol officers, whom many residents perceive as the dangerous and hostile interlopers.

No symbol is more powerful of the widespread rejection of these tactics than the countless individuals mobilizing, demonstrating, risking safety and arrest to protect their communities. Municipality after municipality has risen up in defense of its residents. All the insults or intimidation can alter this fundamental truth.