Yes, they mean it
“Blinded by the Right,” David Brock’s memoir of his time as a conservative operative contains anecdotes on Grover Norquist, the anti-tax radical (by G.W. Bush-era standards), once considered “field marshal of the Bush plan.” Among them, his fondness for rhetoric like Lenin’s “probe with bayonets, looking for weakness.” Lenin’s portrait hung in Norquist’s Washington living room, Brock writes. And another: “Grover Norquist sent out an invitation to a post election party at his Capitol Hill home. Quoting from the movie Conan the Barbarian, it said: ‘TO CRUSH ENEMIES, SEE THEM DRIVEN BEFORE YOU, AND HEAR THE LAMENTATIONS OF THEIR WOMEN.'” Brock added the all-caps.
Norquist was tame by standards of the first Donald Trump administration. That was the Trump who deployed tear gas and rubber bullets outside the White House to clear the streets for a photo-op. His generals convinced him shooting protesters in the legs was uncool.
Trump 2.0 really does mean to deport millions. Tom Homan, his incoming Border Czar and Project 2025 author, doesn’t need Janine Melnitz answering his phone and saying, yes, of course, they’re serious.
Michele Goldberg suggests you consider Trump’s first staff picks if you thought he wasn’t serious. The column’s photo is Trump adviser, Stephen Miller. He always looks out of place without an SS uniform and cap with a death’s head:
In a speech to this year’s National Conservatism Conference, Homan, who oversaw Trump’s family separation policy, promised a “historic deportation operation” from which no undocumented immigrant would be safe. “No one’s off the table in the next administration,” he said. “If you’re here illegally, you better be looking over your shoulder.”
Then, on Monday, Trump named the obsessively anti-immigrant Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff. Miller’s portfolio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported in The Times, “is expected to be vast and to far exceed what the eventual title will convey.” Miller has been forthright about his desire to purge immigrants here illegally, as well as many here legally, from the United States.
Among other things, Miller has said that Trump would cancel the temporary protected status of thousands of Afghans who fled here after the Taliban’s takeover and take another stab at ending DACA, the program that protects from deportation some immigrants brought to the United States as children.
Most significantly, he’s laid out plans to use National Guard troops to help arrest migrants en masse, warehousing them in military camps while they await deportation. No one should be shocked when this happens. I suspect some will be anyway.
Norquist was darkly joking. Guys like Miller and Homan really do look forward to hearing the lamentations of the women.
Rounding up and deporting the undocumented and refugees is just until Miller and Homan get around to denaturalizing the rest who “unlawfully obtained citizenship” or don’t meet their approval.
Here’s the lede from that 2020 piece Miller referenced by Katie Benner:
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department said Wednesday that it had created an official section in its immigration office to strip citizenship rights from naturalized immigrants, a move that gives more heft to the Trump administration’s broad efforts to remove from the country immigrants who have committed crimes.
The president’s friends (Elon Musk), of course, will get a pass.
Introducing today’s “The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent,” Sargent writes:
During the campaign, Donald Trump openly advertised that as president, he’ll use the state to retaliate against his enemies in every way he can. Now The New York Times reports that some of his advisers are urging him to absolutely make good on that threat. And right on cue, Trump erupted on social media, calling for investigations into people supposedly spreading false rumors about his intention to sell shares of his Truth Social—a revealing indicator of the types of abuses of power that we can expect from a second Trump term.
New Yorker staff writer Susan Glasser offers Sargent an image of the Trump 2.0 that we didn’t need:
For someone like Donald Trump—and for all administrations, but particularly for Trump—personnel is policy in effect.
And you’re alluding to this very chilling interview that I had with a former very senior national security official who spent a lot of time in the Oval Office with Trump himself, who told me not long after Trump’s term ended, that this person viewed Trump as the velociraptors in the first Jurassic Park movie. You remember the children run to hide from the velociraptors in the kitchen and they think they’re safe because they’re behind the locked door, and then click, they hear the door handle turn because the velociraptor has learned how to open the door. They’ve learned how to adapt while hunting their prey. The point was Trump understands far better what’s needed to have an administration and a White House that does his bidding rather than having people around him who saw themselves as guardrails against his own inclinations.
Those who held in check Trump’s blacker impulses won’t be around to stop him after January 20. Republicans on the Hill won’t lift a finger to stop him, and the Supreme Court’s given him near-complete immunity.
Glasser adds:
Remember that in his first term in office, Donald Trump would go around, he would go to events … He spoke at an event, for example, in the summer of 2019 in which he literally said, The Constitution gives me the power to do anything I want. So he already believed that even before this immunity decision and it’s quite possible that Trump will pick various fights, because that’s what he does in any role that he’s ever been in, and then say, Here, I’ve gone very, very far out on a limb because who’s going to stop me? Who’s going to stop me?
And Trump willl be working from a template handed him by his pal in Moscow:
My husband and I were correspondents [in Russia] in the first few years of Putin’s term, and Putin moved with extraordinary speed and focus to dismantle the fledgling institutions of Russian democracy. That has been the template and the playbook for other would-be authoritarians who are working within a democratic system. The speed and rapidity with which Trump can make very big changes in our system has been an under-appreciated aspect that I think is now going to kick in.
I’m very sure we are all not going to appreciate what comes out of Trump 2.0. It’s Trump’s enemies and immigrants who will not appreciate it first.