If you haven't got it by now, the cruelty is the point. The disappearing white ladies and the enslaved hairdressers are not incidental, these are the teeth of the matter. The deported students and imprisoned researchers are not coincidental, this is the grinning face of America First, bared proudly to the world. These are the heads on pitchforks outside the gate, rotting in the hot sun of media coverage. They want you to watch, they want you to see, they want you to be appalled. None of this is an embarrassing failure to them, this is a successful advertising campaign, going viral through our disgust.

Remember that the point of torture and abuse is communicative, it's not about getting information out of a person, it's about getting information out to the population. It's about instigating fear in general, not investigating anything in particular.

Like Andrew Jackson, Trump is making an example of people, and he wants you to know. This is not some black mark in American history, it's just another proud billboard on Route 666, their own highway to hell. Like Jackson's Trail Of Tears, Donald Trump is not ashamed, a bloody trail is the message he wants to communicate. American borders have always been drawn in blood, a razor across the face of a free continent. The business of America has always been displacement and exploitation, and Trump, while a bad businessman, is an excellent marketer.

The Numbers

In raw numbers, Joe Biden actually deported more than Trump. But in terms of raw emotions, Trump has got them riled up. The heads on sticks and the bully pulpit is does the work many agents could not. When you watch plainclothes agents abducting Runeysa Ozturk (from Tufts) in broad daylight, you are not watching some brave expose, this is an advertising campaign, a flash mob intended to go viral. The viral fear does the work a thousand agents could not, other people self-censor, self-deport, and stay home. When ICE agents abducted Merwil Gutiérrez, knowing he was the ‘wrong’ guy but saying “Take him anyway,” this was not some fuck up. The cruelty is the point and the casual nature of it is the sword. This can't happen to everybody, but it could happen to anybody. So the people police themselves, in a way ten thousand police could not. And it's working.

While deportations are down, fewer people are choosing to come at all. Brave, brutalized people, driven into wage slavery by America's destruction of their homes, are not braving the brutalized border anymore. ‘Encounters’ by the jealous land thieves of ICE are notably down.

At the same time—and this is to Trump's credit—crossings from Europeans are also down. For a long time American immigration policy was black and white. It was OK for white people. But now that racist cut-out has been cut out. This is racist on racist violence and I, for one, am here for it. They're disappearing white ladies at the Canadian border, deporting Australians, Brits, people who thought they were citizens of the greater White Empire and who participated in its villainy. But dutiful vassalage no longer guarantees safe passage. They're catching white fish and tormenting them for months before cutting them free. Again the cruelty is the point, and the point to even people within the White Empire is, fuck you too.

The Two Masks

Just as Hitler was the last honest European, Trump is the last honest American. Hitler's crime was “that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures” (re: Césaire), and Trump's crime is deporting Europeans. That's what gets reported on, though Obama was known as ‘deporter-in-chief’ and every US President ever had the same deportment. Liberals act like there's no precedent for this President, when Trump is just the office shorn of hypocrisy. As Hannah Arendt said (herself a racist, but nevermind), Trump just expresses the “growing prevalence of mob attitudes and convictions—which were actually the attitudes and convictions of the bourgeoisie cleansed of hypocrisy.”

I, for one, give a fuck about liberal tears. Liberal tears and conservative jeers are two sides of the same performative politics, like the tragedy and comedy masks of Greek theatre. One deports apologetically and the other deports apoplectically, but they're both deplorable. Democrats and Republicans just play the good cop/bad cop roles within the same police state. America was always built on genocide and land theft, slavery and servitude and this hasn't changed at all. They just changed names and kept slaving even more. They only change parties every few years to keep party going for centuries. It's all Epstein island, has been since Columbus.

Since America's founding, the President's job has always been pushing natives out but at the same time pulling racialized labor in. Hating Injuns and ‘niggers’ is not something the American poors came up with on their own, it's something the American property owners encouraged to A) create property and B) work it. Note that the people being pushed back from the southern border are more native Americans than white Americans drawing an imaginary line in the sand.

The Theatrical Tension

Managing the tension between hating your workers and exploiting them was always a delicate balance, the hypocritical hinge that American capitalism swung upon. America is a nation of horse thieves that must whip but not entirely spook the horses. Americans have to hate immigrants enough to keep the wages low, but not so much that they actually stop coming. Trump—bless his black heart—is upsetting all this by taking things so literally (instead of liberally, like he's supposed to).

What Trump doesn't get in his haste is that the ‘immigration problem’ is not supposed to be resolved. It's supposed to be a perennial problem, enabling them suck in seasonal labor. People without rights for people with property rights, that's what the capitalist overlords want. There's no wage theft from illegal people, it's a victimless crime, ie pure profit. Anti-migrant hatred is encouraged by American elites to keep their costs down, it's an advertising campaign, not meant to be taken to its logical conclusion.

Note that the US companies who thrive off this enslaveable labor are not punished at all. Yet that would be the easiest place for a government to start. ICE agents (many of them Hispanic) don't need to walk the hot border, they could just walk into a few air-conditioned board rooms and check the books. But they don't do that, because that would actually interfere with white power. The hypocrisy is the point, and the tension is what keeps the motor of American capitalism wound.

What Trump misses in his sincere channeling of the America id is that the racism was always performative. A show for the white working class while some slave class is used to undercut them. Like the tragedy/comedy masks of Greek theatre, the same charade was practiced by the Romans. As Cornell and Matthews said in their history of the Roman World,

Peasant families were driven out in large numbers by rich investors and were replaced on the land by slave labor. Slaves were in plentiful supply thanks to military victories and the resulting mass enslavement of defeated populations;

Look at the siege warfare against Venezuela, driving slave labor into America, then the performative whipping of those slaves and sending them to concentration camps in El Salvador. Americans are conditioned to complain about the people building their homes but to support the destruction of other people's homes abroad. They can't see the causal connection between foreign and domestic policy, like a junkie complaining about getting blood in their shot. Americans don't get that they wouldn't get people fleeing into their country if they weren't shooting other countries up. It's all a show at their expense (also), and increasingly a charade.

America was founded as a slave state and is and always was. Their elites don't know how to allocate labor in any other way, they just keep reproducing slavery in different forms, with different marketing. After the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement there was an increasing subtlety to the performance, but now the production values have dropped and it's just a horror show. But for someone, somewhere, it always was.

The Final Act

America was always a Jekyll and Hyde act, a slave state that patented freedom, a nuclear killer that prevented proliferation, a warmonger that brought peace. Far from being a detriment, the tension kept the whole high-wire act going, and the drama was renewed for season after season. However, production values have dropped in the last act, dramatically.

Trump, today, is all Sulk: SMASH. A Mr. Hyde that isn't even hiding his villainy. While Trump makes some belated paeans to elite disrepectability, saying he wants to carve out exemptions for farm and hotel labor, this is done half-assedly and with no possible enforcement. Trump is a demolition artist, not a sculptor. From tariffs to migration, he just sulks and smashes, then moves to the next thing. The aging White Empire was joined at the hip by hypocrisy, and Trump is doing hip replacement by chainsaw.

Trump misses the point that two-faced American racism let Americans have their cake and eat it too. They could be structurally racist and have lesser races build their structures. Whereas more genteel racists in Britain were able to both condemn migrants with Brexit and dramatically increase migration afterwards, Trump is actually lowering migration from both colored nations and the rest of White Empire. His policies are actually working! Thus he fulfills the ancient curse, may you get what you wish for.