Disrobing The Ugliness Of Bad Policy
The deputy chief of staff to the president of the United States, Stephen Miller, seems by every measure the malicious palace barber, with mystical influence comparable to that of the infamous Rasputin, whispering in the king’s ear and fueling his excellency’s malignant obsession to eliminate every undocumented immigrant in this country. It is a ferocious march this administration is on. It is cruel in its formulation, ruthless in its execution, blind to mitigating circumstances, and behind it lurks a thinly disguised racism spiced with the occasional whiff of eugenics.
The Trump administration, using the Department of Homeland Security as action agent and the Department of Justice as a wholly owned presidential subsidiary provide, respectively, the tools and a stamp of approval for plainly illegal initiatives.
As a federal policy, it has behind it awesome power of combined federal law enforcement agencies. They strap in, buckle up, arm themselves with assault rifles, helmets, goggles, Kevlar vests, side arms, radios, mace and a very nasty disposition. In preparation for apprehending hardworking, unarmed, non-violent civilians in sweatshirts and flip flops, our intrepid domestic security forces are ready not for remigration but a full up assault on Fallujah. The process, as it unfolds, is an eye-watering example of what the assembly and launch of unrestrained federal power looks like when it is sprung loose under the authority of a rogue president and an AWOL congress.
The policy of “remigration” and the envisaged removal of millions of non-white undocumented immigrants contrasts sharply with the administration’s transparent fascination with the white race. As if smirking, the administration concomitantly moved to rapidly immigrate of a group of white South Africans. Add to this telltale mix the recent travel ban on the citizens of nineteen countries, all of which have histories of terrorism or violent disruption of one one kind or another, and with a few exceptions (Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Cuba, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela) happen to be chiefly black or dark skinned. Apart from the sweeping hostility of the travel ban itself, there is the betrayal of Afghans, many of whom are here because they risked their lives in support of American forces and, if forced, would return home to certain death.
As for the ban itself, for decades the United States immigration clearance program was the province of worldwide American intelligence capabilities, cooperating liaison services and careful screening by American consulates (many of those same consulates scheduled for closure by the Secretary of State to save money). They together determined who should and who should not be allowed to enter. The combined defenses weren’t perfect, but highly effective, and it’s a galactic jump from past policy to cauterization of an entire nation or nations.
The president obsesses not over pursuing that elusive “tide that lifts all boats” but with the white power of Wall Street, commerce and our deep-pocketed captains of industry. These are the power centers he favors, particularly when he can be seen in plain sight fearlessly wetting his own beak. That sends an open code signal of what he prefers and the kind of man he is. You might also see unpleasant messaging in the way the Oval Office dishes out inhospitable treatment to visiting black global leadership.
But, the really inescapable giveaway of what’s at work here, a monstrous smudge on America’s history, is Trump’s unbridled hatred of DEI. WOKE might have been overdone here and there, but he has sought to bleach out the very diversity of America and its core promise of opportunity everywhere it can be found, in government, the arts, education, law, historical references, anywhere. His contempt of DEI disrobes the ugliness of his policies and the hollowness of the man himself. He is acting out, in the formulation of all these hateful anti-DEI and immigration policies, an almost criminal defiance of fundamental American principles, those expressed for example by Lincoln’s “new nation, conceived in liberty and the proposition that all men are created equal”. In his Gettysburg address162 years ago Lincoln wondered, even then and with good reason, if the nation so conceived could long endure. In this our third century of struggling to make a more perfect union the provocations have not abated, and some of the nation’s oldest, most intractable tribulations persist, freshly fed by unenlightened official policy.
Initially founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 270 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.