Trumpism Is at War with the Idea of a Citizenry of Equals

The regime’s latest racist fury is tied to the Right’s much broader attempt to redefine citizenship and national identity in service of an exclusionary white nationalist vision

By Thomas Zimmer, December 13, 2025

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It is as if, to end the year, the Trumpists wanted to remind the world who they are, what fuels their political project, and what their vision for America is.

On November 26, a 29-year-old Afghan national attacked two West Virginia National Guard members deployed to Washington, DC, killing one and severely wounding the other. The Trump government wasted no time using the attack as justification to escalate its crusade against immigrants and anyone who doesn’t belong in MAGA’s conception of “real America.” Trump quickly declared (Opens in a new window) he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries” and “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.“

There it is: Anyone “non-compatible with Western Civilization” – as defined by the Trumpist Right – is out.

Trump also immediately started raging against Somali immigrants in Minnesota, who had nothing to do with the DC shooting, of course, but had been the target of an ongoing far-right smear campaign. In several grotesquely racist rants, the president has called them (Opens in a new window) human “garbage” who “come from hell and do nothing but bitch. We don’t want them.” Trump always makes sure to include Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar in his attacks (Opens in a new window): “We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”

Not to be outdone by the president, DHS secretary Kristi Noem added a monstrously racist rant of her own (Opens in a new window) on social media: “I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” She continued to disparage immigrants as “foreign invaders” who “slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS. WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

In the midst of all this racist fury, the Supreme Court announced on December 6 it would hear a case over the legality of an executive order Trump signed on his first day back in the White House in January. It sought to effectively end birthright citizenship, thereby dramatically undermining the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. This gave Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor who also serves as the America First nativists’ chief loudspeaker, the chance to go berserk (Opens in a new window) on the idea of birthright citizenship: “Of all the destructive and ruinous policies aimed at the heart of our Republic, few can compete with ‘birthright citizenship.’” Miller is – or pretends to be – angry all the time, but birthright citizenship in particular seems to be getting him all riled up: He called it “an atrocity flatly and flagrantly incompatible with any concept of nationhood.”

While all that has been going on, the Trump government also released a new National Security Strategy (Opens in a new window) in early December that is openly hostile towards the European Union and liberal democracies on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a document inspired by and infused with far-right talking points, much to the delight of the domestic extremist scene: Groyper leader Nick Fuentes, for instance, welcomed it (Opens in a new window) as “an explicit acknowledgment of white genocide.” The strategy demands the United States actively support far-right, nativist parties and movements in Europe, taking an aggressively antagonistic stance towards liberal democracy itself. The political scientist Henry Farrell has rightfully called it (Opens in a new window) “a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity.”

Let’s take a step back. These aren’t just a few racist outbursts or isolated escalations. These are not separate policy initiatives. These are manifestations of a worldview defined by white nationalism as its organizing principle. They are tied to a much broader rightwing attempt to reconceptualize national identity and drastically narrow the boundaries of who gets to belong. They are actualizations of the Right’s defining project: To roll back any progress towards egalitarian pluralism, to vanquish the very idea that America should aspire to be a nation defined by equal citizenship in a pluralistic, multiracial society, and to fight instead for white Christian male supremacy at home and in the world.

“What is an American?”

You don’t have to take my word for it. To their credit, I guess, the political and intellectual leaders of today’s Right couldn’t possibly be more open and explicit about their goals. In fact, they have been obsessed with the question of who gets to be a citizen, who gets to define “America,” and who gets to belong. It’s worth diving into a few high-profile examples of rightwing leaders spelling out their vision:

Let’s start with the third night of the Republican convention in July 2024, when it was vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance’s turn to introduce himself (Opens in a new window) to the delegates and the nation. What, to J.D. Vance, is America? It is the “homeland,” as Vance called it repeatedly, for those who are bound to it by ancestry, across many generations, whose blood and bones, quite literally, are tied to the soil. And according to J.D. Vance, they alone have a right to decide who gets to come to this country, who gets to belong in America.

In his speech, Vance explicitly embraced an ethno-religious nationalism. While Vance agreed that “America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas,” he only counted the rule of law and religious liberty amongst those – while not mentioning equality at all. In fact, he specifically rejected the notion of America as defined by a unifying creed: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.”

Who is part of this group of people? That is decided by ancestry and blood. Vance traced his own history back many generations to the mid-nineteenth century as proof that he belonged among those who are one with the “homeland” they inherited. “They love this country,” Vance proclaimed, “not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home.” These “real Americans” have become one with the land – a Volk inseparable from their homeland.

Even when he was pretending to be embracing a form of pluralism, Vance outlined a vision that was irreconcilable with egalitarian ideals. “We welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” Not everyone who is here gets to be equal. There is “We” who get to decide and there is “Them” whose status and citizenship is always conditional. “They” must accept “our terms.”

As Vice President, J.D. Vance continues to channel such blood-and-soil ideas he picks up from the far-right intellectual scene and provide them with the biggest possible platform. This past summer, on July 5, Vance focused on the same themes in a speech at the Claremont Institute’s (Opens in a new window) 2025 Statesmanship Award dinner. A fitting stage, as Claremont is the institutional center for all those rightwing thinkers who are fully devoted to providing an intellectual justification for Trumpism. This time, Vance presented himself as a brave defender of “Western civilization” that is, supposedly, under assault from a “Western liberalism that is socially suicidal or parasitic – that tends to feed off of a healthy host until there’s nothing left.” In order to fight such an insidious force, Vance declared, the Right needed to develop a “unifying ideology” – a proper answer to the question of what an “American” was and how the “meaning of American citizenship in the 21st century” should be defined. Once again, Vance emphatically rejected the idea that agreement with “creedal principals” could provide the basis for American national identity:

“That definition is overinclusive and underinclusive. It would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreigners. Must we admit them tomorrow? But, at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people the ADL would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”

That’s quite the thing to say for the vice president of the United States: Foreigners, because of their ancestry, are definitionally excluded from the national community – or at the very least inherently relegated to lesser status within it, disqualified from becoming “real Americans” like the rightwing extremists who have been here long enough (or came from the same places and “cultures” as the people who have).

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What is an American? That was also the title of a remarkable speech (Opens in a new window) Eric Schmitt, the Republican Senator from Missouri, delivered at the National Conservatism conference in early September. These annual “NatCons” serve as a gathering of all the different intellectual factions and self-proclaimed thinkers on the Right who share an ethno-nationalist vision for America as well as a commitment to intellectualize Trumpism. Schmitt opened by raging against the “fundamentally post-American ruling class” that had been in charge of the country for too long and, as Schmitt saw it, included the Republican establishment as well neoconservative circles with a misguided devotion to spreading democracy abroad. They were all, the senator explained, engaged in a project to destroy the nation from within. What had facilitated their assault was the notion that America was just an idea which, according to Schmitt, turned America into “a vehicle for global liberalism”:

“We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration.”

Against such insidious notions, Schmitt presented a definition of America based on “Western heritage” – and a very narrow conception of who gets to claim it:

“The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls … They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.” 

Go through all the groups Schmitt lists who “built this country for us” and think about who is not included, whose descendants are therefore not among “Us” and do not belong in this version of America: Native Americans, who Schmitt explicitly names as the savage enemy; enslaved Blacks, struggling for freedom; immigrants of color from all over the world, believing in the dream that if they worked hard, they might build a better life for themselves and their children.

This is not particularly subtle, is it? Outside of the most extreme rightwing fringes, you’ll rarely encounter such open, aggressive affirmations of white Western supremacy. Driven by a “restless, relentless, dynamic spirit,” the senator proclaims, “the West” achieved “heights of political, intellectual and technological achievement unmatched by any other civilization in human history.” And America, Schmitt announces, is “the most essentially Western nation” – in fact, “every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints.”

As Schmitt’s speech reaches its nasty crescendo, the senator from Missouri wants to leave absolutely no doubt who is and who is not included in this narrow conception of the nation: “We Americans,” he pleads, “are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” Time to resist those forces of evil leftism that are seeking to destroy the nation from within by trying to teach those “real” Americans to be ashamed of themselves and their great history. But no more. “We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it.” America, Schmitt reminds his audience, “does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.”

To Schmitt and his ilk, America is not merely changing culturally, demographically, politically. By pluralizing, it is dying.

Attacking birthright citizenship

The political movement Vance and Schmitt represent, the one that currently controls the U.S. government and the levers of state power, is evidently not on board with the idea that “all men are created equal.” It is defined by its rejection of any attempt to actualize the egalitarian aspiration that was enshrined most forcefully in the constitution with the Reconstruction amendments.

This is the context for the Trump regime’s attack on birthright citizenship. It is, at its core, not merely a policy dispute or a disagreement over constitutional interpretation. It is a battleground for what this nation should be, what its identity, its defining aspiration should be going forward, and who deserves to belong as equal.

Vance, Schmitt, and Miller want to abolish birthright citizenship because they understand precisely that what is enshrined in the 14th Amendment is fundamentally incompatible with their blood-and-soil nationalism. In a narrow sense, the birthright citizenship clause – the first sentence in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment – was intended to guarantee citizenship for freed slaves. But the framers knew exactly that its implications went far beyond that. It constituted a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dredd Scott that Black people couldn’t be citizens because they were inferior and they didn’t have the necessary hereditary connection – and, more generally, a profound rejection of the notion that some people, because of heritage and blood, had more of a claim to being “American” than others. The Trumpist assault is so preposterous not only because the text of the Amendment is clear – but also because we know what the framers intended to do. They knew exactly what they were doing. They explicitly debated the fact that this clause would bestow guaranteed citizenship not just upon freed slaves, but to lots of other groups as well. No tiered citizenship in America – that is what the text declares, that was the intent of the framers.

White nationalist propaganda and practice

And yet, a polity that excludes anyone who doesn’t fit certain ethno-religious criteria or relegates them to lesser status is exactly the vision that animates the Trumpist Right. And they are fighting for it not just in speeches and pamphlets or in the courts. They are turning the assault on egalitarian pluralism and equal citizenship into policy that is being carried out in the streets by masked agents of the state, spurred on by the crudest, vilest state propaganda.

The official position of the Trump government is that assimilation and cultural pluralism are impossible. Stephen Miller (Opens in a new window) calls it “the great lie of mass migration. You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.” The same day Miller blurted this out, November 28, the official social media channels of the Department of Homeland Security (Opens in a new window) demanded “Remigration now” – endorsing a term that European rightwing extremists have widely adopted as a euphemism for a program of ethnic cleansing via the forced deportation of millions of people. The next day, the Department of Labor (Opens in a new window) chimed in to declare that “The fight for Western Civilization has begun – and Americanism will Prevail.” The term “Americanism” has roots in the early twentieth century when the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups used it to propagate their vision of a purely white America.

No one gets to claim ignorance; there is no plausible deniability for anyone. 

We even got a terrifying preview of what this white nationalist regime would attempt to do at the height of the 2024 election campaign, when the Right’s leaders tried to incite a pogrom against the community of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. In early September 2024, J.D. Vance used his social media (Opens in a new window) to rail against “Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” He added: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”

Vance was leaning into a long-established racist trope – They are eating our pets! –  used to vilify immigrant communities since at least the late nineteenth century. He wasn’t the only one to focus on immigrants from Haiti in Springfield, Ohio: Neo-Nazi groups (Opens in a new window) had been targeting them for quite some time. Leading Republicans quickly echoed Vance’s baseless claims, and the rightwing activist (Opens in a new window) sphere went all in as well. So did Trump himself, who claimed (Opens in a new window) that “illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people destroying their way of life.”

This vile propaganda had its desired effect. City Hall, schools, and the DMV in Springfield had to be evacuated because of bomb threats. Acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed. Hospitals had to be evacuated (Opens in a new window) – so did universities (Opens in a new window), as someone threatened to shoot members of the Haitian community on campus. Ohio State Troopers (Opens in a new window) had to sweep every building in every school in town, every morning before the start of classes, looking for explosives, because the bomb threats kept coming. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis were marching through town (Opens in a new window) – the Proud Boys, and a group called Blood Tribe. Life in Springfield, Ohio upended. All based on a lie.

The parallels to the vile campaign against Somali immigrants are obvious. Once again, the administration picked up something that far-right circles had been pushing. In this case, rightwing activists and think tanks (Opens in a new window) had been focused on welfare fraud among some Somalis in Minnesota. After the attack on members of the National Guard in DC, spokespeople of the regime quickly added a bunch of lies and insinuated (Opens in a new window) there may have been some connection, even going so far as to claim the Somali community formed a “nexus of terrorism.” (Opens in a new window)

This escalation of lies is reminiscent of what happened last fall, when Vance went quickly from “eating pets” to claiming a child had been murdered by “a Haitian immigrant who had no right to be here.” The senator from Ohio did not care that the child’s parents begged him to stop using their boy (Opens in a new window), who was killed in a car accident, to demonize immigrants. Vance even admitted on television that his claims did not stand up to scrutiny. And yet, he felt completely justified in spreading them. In a CNN interview (Opens in a new window), he said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Last September, neo-Nazis hiding their faces descended on Springfield, Ohio. This time, it is ICE and Border Patrol – masked agents of the state functioning as the regime’s paramilitary shock troops. In both cases, the legal status of the targeted immigrant population does not matter to the Right. When asked on television why ICE was going after Somali immigrants when the vast majority of them are U.S. citizens or legal residents, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan casually asserted (Opens in a new window) that “there’s a large illegal Somali community there. There’s a large illegal alien community there.” That, again, is exactly how the Trumpists proceeded when confronted with the fact that the Haitian migrants were in Ohio legally. “I’m still gonna call them an illegal alien,” Vance simply declared (Opens in a new window). For blood-and-soil nationalists, there is a “Higher Truth” that overrides petty facts and superficial reality: The “homeland” is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” That’s also what Vance meant when he fabulated about Kamala Harris “waving the wand illegally” (Opens in a new window) to let Haitian migrants come. It was utter nonsense. Yet “true” in the sense that the ethno-nationalists regard any action that “poisons” the homeland as fundamentally illegitimate.

They mean it

What is unfolding here is not just a sideshow, not merely a distraction from the Right’s plutocratic agenda (although they certainly care about that as well). This is the manifestation of the Right’s defining political project. They really mean it. 

That is true for Donald Trump himself also. He is not just a grumpy old man indulging in racist stereotypes, but a politician committed to a worldview shaped and organized by racism and white supremacy. What is on display here is not just personal bigotry. Donald Trump pursues a political project for which white nationalism serves as an organizing principle.

It is true that Trump is not an ideologue in a strict sense. He is certainly not the type who reads, let alone sits down to write a manifesto. He is also not strictly committed to a specific policy agenda. Trump is animated by a set of grievances. But those are not random. They are related to his view of how status and power ought to be distributed. Donald Trump is deeply convinced that powerful white men like him have a right to be at the top, that it is their prerogative to exert power over others. And how dare anyone object, complain, have the audacity to curtail the ability of men like him to do as they please. 

To say that race is an organizing principle that structures the way Donald Trump perceives of the world is not to claim it is the only one. Gender is crucially important, as is wealth. What Donald Trump believes in is a political and societal order of sharp, brutal hierarchies. That’s why Trump is so perfect as an avatar for today’s Right and their anti-egalitarian, anti-pluralistic project that runs on radicalizing grievance. The white nationalism, the patriarchal domination, the oligarchic control, the Christian supremacism: They are all tied together.

The America the Right wants

Forget, for a moment, the question of what specific label to use for this Trumpist regime or the project it pursues. The most important task is to recognize and spell out what kind of society they want to create. If they succeeded, what would America look like?

The Trumpists desire to drastically narrow the boundaries of who gets to belong, they seek to purge all others from the “homeland.” Those who are left would be living in a society that is not only unequal but has ostracized egalitarian aspirations as heresy. The coercive powers of the state would be mobilized to curtail the rights of those who dare to deviate and entrench a tiered system of participation defined by hierarchies of race, gender, religion, wealth, and ancestry. A segregationist policy would restore white male dominance in elite institutions as well as across all spheres of American life.

As long as they acquiesce, some who don’t qualify as “real Americans” in this white Christian patriarchal ethnostate might be tolerated. But even their lesser status and second-class citizenship would always be conditional. And if they “bitch” too much, as Donald Trump says, or they aren’t sufficiently “grateful,” they will be punished, expelled.

America has never lived up to the egalitarian promise is has often claimed as reality. While we need to acknowledge how deeply flawed the democratic system was that made Trump’s rise possible in the first place, we must also recognize that MAGA doesn’t simply seek to preserve that system but replace it with an entirely different regime. Their “real America” would be a much nastier, much more dangerous, much more hostile place for anyone who dares to deviate from what the Trumpists insist is the “natural” order.

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