Last week in Munich, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded European dignitaries for their failure to address popular discontent. They had ignored what Vance called the most “urgent” issue of our time: the relentless flow of non-Europeans into Europe. Without naming it, Vance was defending a far-right political party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), best-known for its commitment to deporting as many immigrants as the country’s airports can process. Vance said he “happen[s] to agree” with voters worried about “out-of-control migration.” But he was aghast at the idea that governments would try to silence their citizens, whatever their views. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said. “You either uphold the principle of democracy or you do not.”

Germany’s establishment leaders have long accepted a different binary: Either you put up a “firewall” (Brandmauer) against far-right extremists, or you risk losing your democracy to literal Nazis. Accordingly, when the AfD won a plurality in last year’s state-level elections in Thuringia, the other parties cried “Nazi” and stitched together a coalition to keep the AfD out of the government. But this arrangement—even when you win, you lose—has infuriated AfD supporters, and at the party meetings I attended recently, they were in a storm-the-Bastille mood, eager to take down an old regime that they, like Vance, believe is stealing democracy from them in the guise of saving it.  

This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

Earlier this year, I donned a flame-retardant suit and pole-vaulted over the Brandmauer into Thuringia. Like other AfD strongholds, Thuringia was part of the old East Germany, and like much of the East, it remains economically depressed. It has lost more than a fifth of its population since unification. Historically, it is a German cultural center, the home of Goethe and Schiller and Bach—Land of poets and thinkers, the banner at the state’s largest railway station announced—and, in 1929, it was the first part of Germany to vote for the Nazis.

On January 28, I attended an AfD rally in Ichstedt, a town of about 600. I would describe the place for you, but the event began at 7 p.m., which, on a moonless German winter night, in an empty countryside, meant that I may as well have traveled from the train station blindfolded. No businesses were open, and the roads were almost without streetlights. My taxi driver told me that since car factories and copper and potash mines had closed in the area, jobs were few. He asked me whether anyone had ever told me I looked like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the most enthusiastic AfD supporter outside Germany. (I said I was not Musk and hoped to convince him by leaving a miserly tip.)

I was the last to arrive. The rally took place in a humble, rectangular community center, of the sort one might find in a small and dwindling American town. The men and women in the hall also matched the Middle American phenotypes familiar to me from my childhood in Minnesota—the heavyset men in late middle age; the younger men in caps and grimy hoodies; the women with frizzy hair, matching the men beer for beer. I bought a lager, and they invited me to sit at one of the long tables. My coaster was AfD-branded, with a play on a German adage: “Whoever dishonors the farmer, doesn’t deserve the beer.” I searched the room for anyone who looked likely to have non-German ancestry, and only when I caught my own reflection in the bottom of my glass did I see one.

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A theme of the evening, rather than the need to vote for the AfD—the votes of all present were assured—was the need to proclaim one’s support proudly, so Germany knew that this movement could not be ignored or outlawed. “I became a member of the AfD in 2016,” Daniel Haseloff, a party candidate, told the crowd. “Then it was normal to vote for the AfD in secret—to come to the party meetings in the dark and say, I hope no one sees me.” Now, he said, it was time to “declare support at work, among family members, and say, Yes, I stand for the AfD; I stand for deportation, for Fortress Europe, for our great homeland, for our great culture, and for Björn Höcke.”

Höcke, the leader of the Thuringian branch, is a major figure in the AfD’s far-right wing, and one of the main reasons the party’s opponents suspect they’re dealing with real Nazis. In a 2017 speech, Höcke wondered aloud if Germany’s self-flagellation over the Holocaust might not have reached a point of negative returns. Germany, he said, “needed to make a 180-degree change in its commemoration policy.” Before entering politics, Höcke was a teacher of history, not of geometry, so the “180 degree” line left unclear whether he meant that Germany should stop agonizing over its fascist past, or come around to celebrating it. Members of the current government are already discussing banning the AfD, and the group’s supporters at the rally told me they view a strong showing in the election as the only means of survival, because the greater the following, the more awkward a ban will be to implement.

The AfD started in 2013 as an anti–European Union party, full of Germans cranky about having their hard-earned taxes go to bail out lazy Mediterranean countries. A decade on, at the Ichstedt meeting, AfD supporters were still furious that EU membership had added another encrustation of bureaucracy and taxation to an already massive state. But the issue that dominates the party’s platform is immigration, and the chant that animated the Ichstedt crowd most was “Abschieben, abschieben, abschieben”: “Deport, deport, deport!” Germany has seen net migration of more than 5 million people since 2014. More than 1 million of the new arrivals are Syrian and Afghan, and in 2023, the number of people seeking asylum jumped by 50 percent. The AfD has pledged “remigration”—deporting or encouraging the departure of as many of these newcomers as possible, as well as encouraging Germans who have left to come home.  

Party leaders say they wish to make Germany safe again; to end “climate madness” and attempts to rely on solar and wind energy, in their dark and not-always-windy country; and to keep welfare benefits out of the grabbing hands of foreigners and in the hands of Germans. They have also learned to be indignant, along with Vance, about the state of German free expression and democracy, and say that “direct democracy,” rather than democracy filtered through the establishment-party system, will remedy the AfD’s exclusion from power.

Supporters during the AfD general-election-campaign launch, in Halle,. Germany is holding a national election on Sunday. (Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty)​

Sometimes these concerns cross-pollinate with the old hostility toward the EU and its bureaucracy. A speaker at the rally compared the onerous paperwork that the German state demands from its citizens with the light burden it places on asylum seekers. Citizens are denied state services for checking the wrong box, he said, but asylum seekers can show up with no documents, and the state will provide someone to fill out the forms for them and cut them every break. If Germany had to be paperwork hell, then newcomers should be subjected to the same tortures.

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Ichstedt is so sedate that I had trouble imagining any crime there at all. The urban disorder of nearby cities, however, was vivid in the speakers’ and attendees’ minds. It seemed to have inspired equally vivid reverie of how migrants might be rounded up and sent home. Haseloff pledged that the airport in Thuringia’s main city of Erfurt, which has steadily lost passenger business over the past 20 years, would be revitalized through the construction of “deportation prisons” in the surrounding industrial zone. “Under an AfD government in Thuringia, several planes a day will take off to the home of immigrants. By doing so, we will set an example for the whole of Germany. We will make Thuringia an undesirable destination for social migrants.”

Once the Ichstedt rally ended, everyone got up to go home, and a few were already at the door when someone onstage suggested that they close with a few verses of the German national anthem. Everyone stood and sang, solemnly. Germany has had the same anthem since the Weimar Republic, and many decades ago, it was shorn of Nazi-redolent verses such as “Deutschland über alles.” But after two hours’ worth of talk of “the great German homeland” and Kultur, how could one not hear those ominous excised lines echoing distantly?

That echo was unfair to those present. Although the rally attendees definitely wanted to get rid of foreigners, they used no slurs; they did not vilify Islam; they did not use overtly racist language or tropes of extermination; and they seemed sincerely wounded by the accusations that they were fascists. Nevertheless, some rhetoric, when uttered in German, unavoidably sounds odious. The German language is a prison, and anyone who speaks it is trapped by associations that other languages have escaped. “God bless America and the American people” is boilerplate, but “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) is a Nazi slogan, and when I hear a German talking about “das Deutsche Volk” (“the German people”), I wonder if he is reaching for his Luger.

One has to ask: If I were running a far-right party plagued with accusations of sympathy for the Third Reich, would I adopt slogans that encouraged that impression, or that discouraged it? The AfD does the former. Its leader is Alice Weidel, and at rallies one often hears chants of “Alice für Deutschland”—which literally means “Alice for Germany” but sounds just like “Alles für Deutschland,” a Nazi-storm-trooper motto. Some of the party’s other leaders, such as Höcke, keep stumbling into statements that sound at best neutral about the legacy of Nazism. Höcke has warned that if Germans are not appeased, their native “Teutonic fervor” will erupt violently; he once wrote that his country will have to “lose” the part of its population that is “too weak or unwilling to resist the advancing Africanization, Orientalization and Islamization” of German society. (He later said that he meant only that those who denigrate Germany, call it a “shit” or “mongrel” country, or wish for it to be firebombed would have to go.) In the state Parliament in Erfurt last month, Mario Voigt, the leader of the current government in Thuringia, which has shut out the AfD, stared down Höcke and called his party a “Führer cult.” Höcke reacted to this speech by raising his hands in mock alarm.

On numerous occasions, the party has embraced vicious and personal campaign tactics. This year, the AfD leafleted immigrant-heavy communities in Karlsruhe with fake one-way economy-class tickets dated for election day. The passenger name was “illegal immigrant”; the destination: “safe country of origin.” “It’s nice at home too,” the tickets said, with assurances that “citizens will not be deported,” though the wording implied that all who could be legally deported should be. One after another, individuals welcomed by the party have been found to have nasty episodes in their past—harassment of Jews, minimizing statements about Hitler.

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Complicating matters is the fact that Weidel, the actual Führer (or Führerin) of the AfD, is hardly Third Reich–compliant. She can speak in fiery tones about immigration: “On the first day in government, we will seal off the German borders,” she promised a crowd earlier this month, adding, “No one will be able to come in.” But she is also curious about the world outside Germany for reasons unrelated to conquering it; she speaks Chinese and lived in China for six years. And although she has Aryan skin and hair, she is married to a woman of Sri Lankan origin, with whom she is raising two sons. In her speeches, she stresses that Germany must comply fully with refugee law—but she adds that “asylum is temporary and ends when the reason for fleeing no longer applies.” Her opponents accuse her party of an unseemly interest in concepts like “the German people” (with all that phrase’s Nazi baggage). But Weidel herself seems most passionate when defending the elimination of carbon taxes and the return of the internal combustion engine.

Even the party’s detractors acknowledge that most AfD supporters are not personally racist, and that many have been drawn to the AfD because of their displeasure with botched or bizarre economic policies. Weidel is adept at drawing conversations toward policies that many Germans, whatever they think about immigration, can agree were foolish, and should have been recognized as such at the time. The establishment parties, after all, were in charge when Germany shifted away from nuclear power, toward wind energy and natural gas piped in from Russia—essentially volunteering itself as a hostage in case Russia ever became an enemy of Europe. (The AfD, like the Trump administration, is very friendly toward Russia, and wishes to reopen pipelines from there to diversify energy supply and lower prices.)

Weidel can dwell on these boneheaded policies in part because almost every German keen on mass deportation is already planning to vote for her, and those in the center are up for grabs. That said, the AfD knows that crime and immigration are winning issues. When I interviewed Stefan Möller, an AfD politician and a deputy to Höcke, he was filled with sensible commentary about the failed economic policies of previous governments. But his eyes really lit up when I turned to immigration, because the AfD has simply dominated all public discussion of its downsides. “Almost every day, we’re seeing reports of knife attacks, of children being hunted down in schools,” Möller told me. “We are expected to prevent things like the knife attack in Aschaffenburg, or the attack in Magdeburg, or the rampant crime. These are not acceptable. And the answer, for society and for our voters, is a consistent policy.”

By now it is impossible to ignore the crime rates of recent immigrants to Germany. In 2023, about 41 percent of crimes were thought to have been committed by foreigners. The anecdotes match the data: Several high-profile cases of bizarre public violence, such as the stabbing of random children, have involved foreigners. At a rally I attended in the town of Sonneberg, a politician named Oliver Kirchner referred to Germany as “the world’s mental hospital,” for its willingness to accept criminally insane foreigners.

Möller told me he lives on the outskirts of Erfurt, and is therefore spared having to deal daily with the crime-ridden area around the train station and main square. He told me a story about children from his suburb who went downtown for ice cream. “They made a mistake on the way home,” he said. “Instead of walking along the tramway, where it’s busy, they went on Tromsdorf Street.” There, he said, they were beset and mugged by a gang of teenage immigrants. Then he invited me to become prey myself. “Go there, and you will see what I mean,” he said. “That is where they find their victims.”

Möller must have underestimated how cheaply The Atlantic houses its reporters when on assignment, because I needed no invitation: I had already booked a hotel near the train station, at the end of Tromsdorf Street. Like almost all railway hubs in Germany nowadays, this one had Syrians and other immigrants standing idly at all hours, talking in Arabic and Afghan languages. Because I was jet-lagged, I would walk Tromsdorf Street late at night, always returning to my room unstabbed. The area seemed not so much crime-ridden as eerily vacant, my footsteps echoing in the shadows like Joseph Cotten’s in Vienna in The Third Man. The shops—many of them Middle Eastern markets—closed after dark. Once or twice I fell into step with a few young guys and wondered if I had hit the jackpot and found a gang. But I am a grown man, not a woman or a tween with an ice-cream cone, so even if they were evaluating me for a mugging, they probably thought better of it. Once, two of them got closer, and I heard them talking in Arabic about going into a pool hall.

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Standing idly is not a crime; neither is speaking a foreign language. By American urban standards, the street was extremely safe. But Möller’s anxiety stems from a predictable form of culture shock, when a very old country changes very fast. Anyone who thought ordinary Germans could cope with this shock, and even welcome it, was deluded. Those streets had been emptying out for some time as the region’s economy flagged and its population declined, and for years they had been even more silent than they are today. No one predicted that when the silence was broken, the voices to break it would be Syrian.

This surprise, unthinkable just a decade ago, has led to grotesque calumnies against vulnerable people, as well as policy proposals that are both clumsy and inhumane. But even Möller, who works directly with one of the AfD’s most incendiary politicians, would when pressed acknowledge that the ideal German future would not look like the distant, romanticized German past, of lederhosen and beer and Wagner.

I asked Möller when he thought Germany went wrong—what year he would go back to, in his Flux Capacitor–equipped Audi, to reboot his country and avert the problems he wanted to solve. He said that he disapproved of Germany’s immigration policy going back as far as he could remember—but 2000, roughly, when Germany’s borders disintegrated and its currency vanished, was when everything started falling apart. I told him that I had started coming to Germany around that time, and even then it had seemed that immigrants were integrating into German society. And it hadn’t seemed so bad to have foreigners there, doing jobs that Germans were losing interest in.

Möller mostly agreed, and noted that the AfD itself had changed its maximalist position on immigration—deport them all—to a more targeted agenda of removing welfare-claiming layabouts, unskilled laborers, and criminals. “Today even our own voters expect us to differentiate,” Möller told me, between violent criminals and “migrants who integrated very well, who are now German citizens, who do not cause any problems.” He said that “no AfD voter expects the AfD—not even in Thuringia—to deport doctors, engineers, or some mailman from Ghana.”

Bjӧrn Hӧcke, the leader of the Thuringian AfD branch, raises his hands at a campaign event in Thuringia. (Michael Reichel / picture-alliance / dpa / AP)

The true collapse happened in 2015, Möller believes, when Syrian and Afghan refugees began arriving in huge numbers. He said any cardiologists or engineers among the legal newcomers should be welcome to stay. But the suggestion that such migrants might come, he told me, is for now “awfully theoretical.” The 2015 wave of migration, he said, had flooded the country with “social migrants,” those who came to enjoy free money from a welfare state, including Syrians and Afghans poorly equipped to integrate into an economy no longer dependent on labor performed by illiterate peasants. “The people we need for [skilled] jobs are not coming,” he told me. “The Indian engineer is not coming, because the Indian engineer will go to a place where he earns more money, where he pays less taxes, where his children are taught in decent schools, and where it is safe to go into town in the evening. He won’t stay in Erfurt.”

This was a persistent theme among AfD supporters and politicians: that Germany had become a shithole country, not fit for an engineer from Delhi, and it needed to become worse for newcomers to be livable for anyone. Donald Trump’s first inaugural speech was about “American carnage,” and now the AfD described an equally awful Germany. It is a weird sensation to go to Germany—the center of what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” where I once stayed near a corner bakery old enough to have served Martin Luther—and find that it feels like America’s political younger sibling.

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But the longer history of the AfD is distinctively German, and the result of 50 years of politics perhaps too sedate for its own good. Germany, having been responsible for an eventful half century, decided to forswear eventfulness for the next half century. It was instead governed by a familiar species of cautious, credentialed bureaucrat: never younger than late middle age; usually addressed as Herr Doktor or Frau Doktor; always white, of course. Except for Angela Merkel, one would be forgiven for failing to match faces to names—and to some extent that interchangeability was a relief, considering the last time a German leader was immediately identifiable by face and mustache. The watchful conservatism was exemplified by the campaign slogan of Konrad Adenauer, leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): “Keine Experimente!” The center-left party, the Social Democratic Party, was similarly conservative: no experiments, no funny business.

This status quo, bland as a Bavarian dumpling, faced challengers from the extreme left and right. The radical left produced violent factions—Baader Meinhof, Red Army—whose members ended up hunted and imprisoned. The radical right in Germany posed a more complicated problem. West Germany was plagued with accusations of having incompletely de-Nazified. Many politicians and business leaders had fought in the war, and a don’t-mention-the-war attitude prevailed among those of social grace—if the war was mentioned, the mention should sound disgusted, and anyone who spoke of it in any other way, including in neutral terms, faced shunning and worse. Neo-Nazi parties in Germany felt the full force of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungsschutz, the German equivalent of the FBI), and were shut down.

Those on the far right who wriggled out of being banned confronted instead a disciplined, broad, organized political punishment: the “firewall” that Vance finds so objectionable. Their parties, up to now, have been treated as unhygienic, so that even if the far right and the center agree on something, the center refuses to court the far right’s vote and instead treats it as untouchable. The task of tending the firewall’s flame was judged so important that the parties of the center increased their cooperation with the Green Party and the old East German Left. On immigration, the CDU quietly adopted the view of the left, that Germany’s future would be as a land of immigrants and that anyone who suggested that this vision was undesirable was probably a racist. During Merkel’s long tenure as chancellor, from 2005 to 2021, her party—while nominally center-right—came to embrace certain elements of the far left. This included, fatefully, the welcoming of millions of undocumented immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries beset by war or poverty. Merkel’s line, in the face of this extraordinary situation, was “Wir schaffen das”: “We’ll manage it.”

AfD supporters gather for an election-campaign meeting in eastern Germany on August 14, 2024. (Michaela Stache / AFP / Getty)

Hans-Georg Maassen, who was Merkel’s head of domestic intelligence during this period and who was responsible for immigration law before that, has since been ejected from the CDU and started his own party, the Values Union, in part over his criticism of Merkel’s de facto open-borders policy. “For her, immigration policy was ideological,” he told me. “To let in millions of new people, without discussion: This is against the law.” The CDU, by taking this step, had become indistinguishable from the parties to its left, such as the Greens, who openly favored transforming Germany into an internationalist-left society. “People noticed,” Maassen told me. “If you vote for the Greens, you get a Green immigration policy. If you vote for the [Social Democratic Party], you get a Green immigration policy. And for the CDU, that gets you a Green immigration policy too.” That left an opening for the AfD. And as soon as Germans decided that immigration was the issue, the AfD was ready to win big for having consistently opposed it.

This history explains why the AfD directs its most bitter invective not at the immigrants, not at the leftists, but at the center-right. AfD leaders say the CDU caved to the left instead of turning back as many “social migrants” as the law allows. The process of telling refugees apart from non-refugees is extremely difficult, with dire consequences for those refugees wrongly flagged as non-refugees. Faced with that problem, Germany tried—I wrote about it for this magazine in 2018—but not, according to the AfD, hard enough.

In Ichstedt, Daniel Haseloff cautioned against being satisfied with anything but dismantling the CDU. “The CDU is our main opponent—not just here but in all of Germany,” he said. He did not even bother mentioning the left. “We will only be fully successful when the CDU in its current form no longer exists,” he told the crowd. “Trump has shown us how it’s done.” Only after the establishment Republicans were demolished, he said, was there “room for Trump, for Elon Musk.” (Some people looked my way.)

The man most likely to win this week’s election and become the new chancellor is Friedrich Merz, of the CDU. He has tried to court AfD voters and push through immigration legislation that the left viewed as too friendly to the AfD. This, Haseloff said, was a trick. The CDU just wants to peel off AfD votes—and when it does, it will do what governments have done before, and shut the party down. “Merz wants to see the party banned after the federal election,” Haseloff said. “That means he doesn’t see us as partners tomorrow; he sees us as opponents.”

It’s funny, then, that the biggest demonstrations in Germany that week were against the CDU—not by AfD supporters, but by their enemies on the left, who thought Merz had extinguished the firewall and given in to Nazis. I attended a protest outside CDU headquarters in Berlin the day after I left Thuringia, and felt as if I had traveled through time, from a small town decades ago, with its farmers and factory workers, to a gathering of modern university students in a cosmopolitan city. Demonstrators had spiky hair and sustained themselves with takeaway containers of kebabs, rather than beer and sausage. The youth of the protesters was salted and peppered with middle-aged and older people, the sorts of folks one sees at cultural events in the Bay Area or Vermont.

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They told me that by treating AfD voters and politicians as potential friends, rather than as pariahs, the CDU had welcomed racists back into the Reichstag. “We stand together against all right-wing extremism, regardless of whether it comes from the AfD or from the CDU,” a young woman with a bullhorn told the crowd. She said the CDU had never been a friend of immigrants, and now, by reaching out to the AfD, it had shown how false its friendship had always been. No one should trust them again, and demonstrators—the people—were the only ones standing between Germany and a return to racism. She led a chant: “Wir sind die Brandmauer”: “We are the firewall.”

Most noteworthy, at this protest outside the CDU, was that none of these people were members of the center-right, objecting to their party’s change in policy. They were all members of the left fringe of a broad coalition, hectoring members of the coalition’s center-right into maintaining an immigrant-friendly policy that the left flank had insisted on, and that the rest of the coalition had accepted with reservations. At the AfD meeting I had attended the night before, the message was: Don’t trust the CDU, even when it does what you want. Tonight the message was, Don’t trust the CDU, even though it did what you wanted for almost 10 years.

To some extent, this bind is just what happens in coalition politics: Being in the center means getting pinched by parties from both sides, but also having the chance to work with those parties and steal their voters with both hands. For much of Germany’s postwar history, however, coalition politics have not played out in the manner of most parliamentary democracies, because the center and left parties have conspired to treat the far right as radioactive. Here again one would expect Germans, of all people, to understand the dynamics of walls: that if you build them up, the pressure mounts on one side, and when the wall crashes down, the equilibration can be dramatic. Even as sensible a rule as Don’t be nice to Nazis cannot repeal this dynamic of hydrostatic pressure. The far right can be suppressed only so long, but that just means a reckoning postponed rather than avoided.

By sequestering the AfD on the right, the CDU kept itself free from the contagion of the party’s most odious members. It also lost its only chance to lure the non-odious AfD members to its side, and to explain how a Germany with a generous—but not infinitely generous—policy toward beleaguered foreigners could remain prosperous, safe, and German. I found Stefan Möller much more reasonable when I could press him, and get him to exempt his Ghanaian postman from deportation. In this way he is like most people: pricklier when left alone, and more reasonable when reasoned with.

Maassen, the former Merkel colleague, had been a CDU candidate in Thuringia before he started his own party. He told me how his attempts to stand for election on the CDU line eventually became untenable, because voters came to think of the CDU as a party of scolds, and of thought-police in a new guise. He noted that people there knew, because they had lived through one-party rule in the East, what a stifled politics felt like. “In East Germany, if they were an opponent of the regime, they had to look to the left, to the right, if they were in a restaurant and talking politics, in case somebody had big ears. Nowadays they have the same feeling if they are members of the AfD.” But if you complained about this stiflement in East Germany, your punishment could be severe. Now the problems are lesser, although still real: losing your job, your freedom to associate with other far rightists. The deeper issue, he said, was the AfD members’ sense of betrayal by a system that they had been told was open. “The AfD supporters say, This is not democratic.”

The best way to dismantle the federal government, then repurpose it as a tool of personal power and ideological warfare, is to start with the soft targets. Entitlements and defense, which comprise more than half of federal spending and a large share of its fraud and waste, enjoy too much support for Elon Musk to roll them up easily. But nothing is less popular than sending taxpayers’ money to unknown people in poor, faraway countries that might be rife with corruption. Americans dislike foreign aid so much that they wrongly believe it consumes at least a quarter of the budget (in the previous fiscal year, aid constituted barely 1 percent). President John F. Kennedy understood the problem, and after creating the United States Agency for International Development, in 1961, he told his advisers: “We hope we can tie this whole concept of aid to the safety of the United States. That is the reason we give aid. The test is whether it will serve the United States. Aid is not a good word. Perhaps we can describe it better as ‘Mutual Assistance.’ ” At another meeting, Kennedy suggested “International Security.”

USAID continued for the next six decades because leaders of both parties believed that ending polio, preventing famine, stabilizing poor countries, strengthening democracies, and opening new markets served the United States. But on January 20, within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that froze foreign aid. USAID was instructed to stop nearly all work. Its Washington headquarters was occupied and sensitive data were seized by whiz kids from Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. One of their elder members, a 25-year-old software engineer and Matt Gaetz fan named Gavin Kliger, acquired an official email address to instruct the staff of USAID to stay home.

Contractors were fired and employees were placed on indefinite leave; those on overseas missions were given 30 days to return to the States with their families. Under orders to remain silent, they used pseudo­nyms on encrypted chats to inform the outside world of what was going on. When I spoke on Signal with government employees, they sounded as if they were in Moscow or Tehran. “It felt like it went very authoritarian very quickly,” one civil servant told me. “You have to watch everything you say and do in a way that is gross.”

The website usaid.gov vanished, then reappeared with a bare-bones announcement of the organization’s dismemberment, followed by the message “Thank you for your service.” A veteran USAID official called it “brutal—­from some 20-year-old idiot who doesn’t know anything. What the fuck do you know about my service?” A curtain fell over the public information that could have served to challenge the outpouring of lies and distortions from the White House and from Musk, who called USAID “a criminal organization” and “evil.” If you looked into the charges, nearly all turned out to be outright falsehoods, highly misleading, or isolated examples of the kind of stupid, wasteful programs that exist in any organization.

A grant for hundreds of ethnic-minority students from Myanmar to attend universities throughout Southeast Asia became a propaganda tool in the hands of the wrecking crew because it went under the name “Diversity and Inclusion Scholar­ship Program”—as if the money were going to a “woke” bureaucracy, not to Rohingya refugees from the military regime’s genocide. The orthodoxy of a previous administration required the terminology; the orthodoxy of the new one has ended the students’ education and forced them to return to the country that oppressed them. One of Trump’s executive orders is called “Defending Women Against Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”; meanwhile, the administration suspended the online education of nearly 1,000 women in Afghanistan who had been studying undetected by the Taliban with funding from the State Department.

But hardly anyone in this country knows these things. Contesting Musk’s algorithmically boosted lies on X with the tools of a reporter is like fighting a wildfire with a garden hose.

With no workforce or funding, USAID’s efforts around the world—vaccine campaigns in Nepal, HIV-drug distribution in Nigeria, nutrition for starving children in Sudanese refugee camps—were forced to end. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who championed USAID as a senator and now, as the agency’s acting head, is its executioner) issued a waiver for lifesaving programs. But it proved almost meaningless, because the people needed to run the programs were locked out of their computers, had no way to communicate, and feared punishment if they kept working.

The heedlessness of the aid wreckers recalls Nick Carraway’s description in The Great Gatsby of Tom and Daisy Buchanan: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” An agency of 10,000 employees is shrinking to about 300 and, despite its statutory independence, being dissolved into the State Department. The veteran USAID official I spoke with foresaw a skeletal operation reduced to health and food assistance, with everything else—education, the environment, governance, economic development—gone. But even basic humanitarian programs will be nearly impossible to sustain with the numbers that the administration envisions—for example, 12 staff members for all of Africa.

“This is the infrastructure and architecture that has given us a doubling of the human lifespan,” Atul Gawande, the writer and surgeon who was the most recent, and perhaps last, head of the agency’s Bureau for Global Health, told me. “Taking it down kills people.”

Trump and Musk’s destruction of USAID was a trial blitzkrieg: Send tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers. The assault provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy. It also demonstrated the radicalism of Trump’s view of America’s role in the world.

Every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Barack Obama understood that American power was enhanced, not threatened, by attaching it to alliances, institutions, and values that the American people support, such as freedom, pluralism, and humanitarianism. This was the common idea behind Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan for postwar Europe, Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, Jimmy Carter’s creation of the U.S. refugee program, and George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. These weren’t simple acts of generosity. They were designed to prevent chaos and misery from overwhelming other countries and, eventually, harming our own. They expanded American influence by attraction rather than coercion, showing people around the world that the Leviathan could benefit them, too. Political scientists call this “soft power.”

Every president betrayed these ideas in one way or another, making U.S. foreign policy a fat target for criticism at home and abroad, by the left and the right. Kennedy used foreign aid to wage a bloody counterinsurgency in South Vietnam; Carter put human rights at the center of his policy and then toasted the repressive shah of Iran; Bush, claiming to be spreading democracy to the Middle East, seriously damaged America’s global legitimacy. USAID antagonized host governments and local populations with its arrogance and bloat. “We had a hand in our own destruction,” one longtime official told me. “We threw money in areas we didn’t need to.”

But the alternative to the hypocrisies of soft power and the postwar liberal order was never going to be a chastened, humbler American foreign policy—­neither the left’s fantasy of a plus-size Norway nor the right’s of a return to the isolationist 1920s. The U.S. is far too big, strong, and messianic for voluntary diminish­ment. The choice for this superpower is between enlightened self-­interest, with all its blind spots and failures, and raw coercion.

Trump is showing what raw coercion looks like. Rather than negotiate with Canada and Mexico, impose U.S. demands with tariffs; rather than strengthen NATO, undermine it and threaten a conflict with one of its smallest, most benign member countries; rather than review aid programs for their efficacy, shut them down, slander the people who make them work, and shrug at the humanitarian catastrophe that follows. The deeper reason for the extinction event at USAID is Trump’s contempt for anything that looks like cooperation between the strong and the weak. “America First” is more imperialist than isolationist, which is why William McKinley, not George Washington or John Quincy Adams, is Donald Trump’s new presidential hero. He’s using a techno-futurist billionaire to return America to the late 19th century, when the civil service was a patronage network and great-power doctrine held that “might makes right.” He’s ridding himself and the country of restraining codes—the rule of law at home, the rules-based order abroad—and replacing them with a simple test: “What’s in it for me?” He’s unilaterally disarming America of its soft power, making the United States no different from China, Russia, or Iran. This is why the gutting of USAID has received propaganda assistance and glowing reviews from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran.

Transactional logic has an obvious appeal. Dispensing with the annoying niceties of multilateral partnerships and foreign aid brings a kind of clarity to international relations, showing where the real muscle is, like a strip-down before a wrestling match. Set loose, the U.S. might be strong enough to work its will on weaker friends and neighbors, or at least claim to do so. Trump’s threat of tariffs to intimidate Colombia into allowing deportation flights to land there was like the assault on USAID—an easy demonstration project. His domination of the propaganda sphere allows him to convince the public of victories even where, as with Canada, there was never much of a dispute to begin with. If NATO dissolved while the U.S. grabbed Greenland, many Americans would regard it as a net win: We’d save money and gain a strategic chunk of the North Atlantic while freeing ourselves of an obligation whose benefit to us wasn’t entirely clear.

It isn’t obvious why funding the education of oppressed Burmese students serves our national interest. It’s easier to see the advantages of strong-­arming weak countries into giving in to our demands. If this creates resentment, well, who said gratitude mattered between nations? Strength has its own attractive force. A sizable cohort of Americans have made their peace with Trump, not because he tempered his cruelty and checked his abuses but because he is at the height of his power and is using it without restraint. This is called power worship. The Russian invasion of Ukraine won Vladimir Putin a certain admiration in countries of the global South, as well as among MAGA Americans, while Joe Biden’s appeals to democratic values seemed pallid and hypocritical. The law of “might makes right” is the political norm in most countries. Trump needs no explaining in Nigeria or India.

Coercion also depends on the American people’s shortsightedness and incuriosity. Trump’s flood of executive orders and Musk’s assault on the federal government are intended to create such chaos that not even the insiders most affected understand what’s happening. An inattentive public might simply see a Washington melee—the disrupters against the bureaucrats. Short of going to war, if the U.S. starts behaving like the great powers of earlier centuries and the rival powers of our own, how many Americans will notice a difference in their own lives?

According to Rubio, the purpose of the aid pause is to weed out programs that don’t advance “core national interests.” Gawande compared the process to stopping a plane in midair and firing the crew in order to conduct a review of the airline industry. But the light of the bonfire burning in Washington makes it easier to see how soft power actually works—how most aid programs do serve the national interest. Shutting down African health programs makes monitoring the recent outbreak of Ebola in Uganda, and preventing its spread from that region to the rest of the world, nearly impossible. In many countries, the end of aid opens the door wider to predatory Chinese loans and propaganda. As one USAID official explained: “My job literally was countering China, providing develop­ment assistance in a much nicer, kinder, partnership way to local people who were being pressured and had their arms twisted.” When 70 Afghan students in central Asia, mostly women, had their scholarships to American universities suddenly suspended and in some cases their plane tickets canceled, the values of freedom and open inquiry lost a bit of their attractiveness. The American college administrator responsible for the students told me, “Young people who are sympathetic to the United States and share our best values are not only not being welcomed; they’re having the door slammed in their faces.”

Most Americans don’t want to believe that their government is taking life­saving medicine away from sick people in Africa, or betraying Afghans who sacrificed for this country. They might disapprove of foreign aid, but they want starving children to be fed. This native generosity explains why Trump and Musk have gone to such lengths to clog the internet with falsehoods and hide the consequences of their cruelty. The only obstacle to ending American soft power isn’t Congress, the bureaucracy, or the courts, but public opinion.

One of the country’s most popular programs is the resettlement of refugees. For decades, ordinary American citizens have welcomed the world’s most persecuted and desperate people—European Jews after World War II, Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon, Afghans after the fall of Kabul. Refugees are in a separate category from most immigrants: After years of waiting and vetting by U.S. and international agencies, they come here legally, with local sponsors. But Trump and his adviser Stephen Miller see them as no different from migrants crossing the southern border. The flurry of executive orders and memos has halted the processing of all refugees and ended funding for resettlement. The story has received little attention.

Here’s what the program’s shutdown means: I spoke with an Afghan special-forces captain who served alongside Americans—­when Kabul was about to fall in 2021, he prevented armed Taliban at the airport from seizing U.S. weaponry, but he was left behind during the evacuation. Arrested by the new regime, the captain was imprisoned for seven months and suffered regular and severe torture, including the amputation of a testicle. He managed to escape with his family to Pakistan in 2023 and was near the end of being processed as a refugee when Trump took office. He had heard Trump criticize the Biden administration for leaving military equipment behind in Afghanistan. Because he had worked to prevent that from happening, he told me, “that gave me a hope that the new administration would value my work and look at me as a valuable person, a person who is aligned with all the administration is hoping to achieve, and that would give a chance for my kids and family to be moved out safely.” Biden’s ineptitude stranded the captain once; Trump’s coldheartedness is doing it again.

A sense of loyalty and compassion isn’t extraneous to American identity; it is at the core of national pride, and its betrayal exacts a cost that can’t be easily measured. The Biden administration created a program called Welcome Corps that allows ordinary Americans to act as resettlement agencies. (My wife and I participated in it.) In Pennsylvania, a retiree named Chuck Pugh formed a sponsor group to bring an Afghan family here, and the final medical exam was completed just before Inauguration Day. When resettlement was abruptly ended, Pugh found himself wondering, Who are we? I know what I want to think, but I’m just not sure. The sponsor group includes Pugh’s sister, Virginia Mirra. She and her husband are devout Christians and ardent Trump supporters. When I asked her early this month how she felt about the suspension of the refugee program, she sounded surprised, and disappointed—she hadn’t heard the news. “I feel sad about that,” she said. “It does bother me. It’s starting to sink in. With these people in danger, I would wonder if there would be an exception made for them. How would we go about that?” Her husband frequently sends American-flag lapel pins to Trump, and I suggested that he write the president about the Afghan family. “I will talk to my husband tonight,” Mirra said. “And I will continue to pray that the Lord will protect them and bring them to this country by some means. I do believe in miracles.”

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “The Era of Might Makes Right.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

A criminal case is not a chit. It’s not something you trade in exchange for political favors.

Perhaps the always-transactional President Donald Trump does not understand the importance of keeping the Department of Justice independent from partisan politics. But Attorney General Pam Bondi and Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove should.

Seven lawyers have now resigned rather than comply with Bove’s order to file a motion to dismiss the indictment against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was charged in September in a public-corruption case. The Trump administration’s handpicked interim U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York, Danielle Sassoon, quit rather than file the motion. According to a memo from Bove, Sassoon was directed to dismiss the case, not because of the merits of the case, but on the grounds that the charges were politically motivated and that they would interfere with Adams’s abilities to enforce violent-crime and immigration laws. A particularly galling detail of the directive was that the case be dismissed “without prejudice,” meaning that it could be filed again—a detail that created at least the impression that the Trump administration would be keeping Adams on a short leash to ensure his compliance with its wishes. Threatening prosecution for political gain is a violation of legal ethics.

[Quinta Jurecic: What will happen if the Trump administration defies a court order?]

According to Sassoon’s own account, she appealed to the attorney general, to no avail, and resigned yesterday. In a letter to Bondi, Sassoon wrote that her duty to administer the law impartially included “prosecuting a validly returned indictment regardless of whether its dismissal would be politically advantageous, either for the defendant or those who appointed me.” Her firm stance triggered a cascade of resignations throughout the Department of Justice, from five lawyers at DOJ’s Public Integrity Section who similarly refused to file the motion to dismiss. Bove suspended the two assistant U.S. attorneys working on the case with Sassoon.

On Friday, one of those prosecutors, Hagan Scotten, resigned in a scathing letter to Bove. He called the accusation about political motivation for the indictment “so weak as to be transparently pretextual.” He said the other purported reason for the dismissal was even worse, blasting Bove’s use of criminal charges “to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives,” which he called “a violation of our laws and traditions.” He closed: “If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion, but it was never going to be me.”

Ultimately, a senior lawyer at the Public Integrity Section filed the motion, in an apparent effort to spare others from losing their jobs. It is easy to say all of the lawyers in the section should have resigned, but like many Americans, government lawyers have mortgages, child care, tuition, and other bills to pay. Moreover, if all 30 lawyers in the Public Integrity Section were to resign, they would in all likelihood be replaced with Trump loyalists, who would no doubt bear very little resemblance to the title of the section where they would work. One hopes that the judge assigned to the case will hold a hearing before granting the motion to dismiss, putting Bove under oath to explain his efforts, which so clearly seem to undermine the department’s integrity.

Lest anyone believe that Sassoon and Scotten are some sort of Democratic Party operatives, both have sterling conservative credentials. Sassoon is a former law clerk to the late Justice Antonin Scalia and an active member of the Federalist Society. Scotten is a military veteran, two-time Bronze Star recipient, and former law clerk to then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh and Supreme Court Chief Justice John R. Roberts Jr. This is not about party politics. It is about the Department of Justice’s responsibility to uphold the law.

I know from my 20 years as a federal prosecutor that DOJ lawyers take an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not to carry out the president’s political agenda. While they may be expected to honor the president’s enforcement priorities, they are—or, at least, were—insulated from direct political control over any particular case in order to ensure the fair administration of justice and the public trust. The Department’s Principles of Federal Prosecution specifically state that prosecutors may not consider “political association, activities, or beliefs” when making charging decisions. In addition, for the past 40 years, attorneys general have restricted communications between the White House and DOJ attorneys to protect their decisions from political influence.

[Read: Another edgelord comes to power]

Imagine a world where a president could use the threat of criminal charges or the promise to dismiss them as a way of coercing a public official to advance his policy agenda. Rather than serving the voters who elected that official in good faith, such a person would be beholden to the president, doing his bidding for fear of the criminal consequences. A governor or a mayor who agreed to such terms could even break laws with impunity so long as he went along with the president’s agenda. That kind of arrangement would violate the rule of law—the concept that the law applies equally to everyone. Moreover, it could have disastrous consequences for countless people living in that official’s jurisdiction.

DOJ lawyers pride themselves on working for an organization that is unique among federal agencies in its independence from politics. The heroes of the department are the attorneys general throughout history who stood up for the rule of law—Robert Jackson, who also worked as a Nuremberg prosecutor; Elliot Richardson, who resigned rather than fire the independent counsel during the Nixon administration; and Edward Levi, who implemented the post-Watergate norms and principles that guide federal prosecutors to this day. In more recent times, Sally Yates accepted termination in 2017 rather than implement the first iteration of Trump’s clearly unconstitutional travel ban from Muslim-majority countries. It had to be amended twice before it was upheld by the Supreme Court.

And now add the Valentine’s Day Seven to that pantheon of DOJ heroes.

* Source Images: John Lamparski / Getty; Erik McGregor / LightRocket / Getty; Yuki Iwamura / Bloomberg / Getty; Mikroman6 / Getty.

A US federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift a three-week funding freeze that has shut down US aid and development work globally.

U.S. government debt slid on Wednesday, sending yields higher across the range of maturities, after faster-than-expected inflation made investors less optimistic about the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates this year, especially given the unknown effects of President Donald Trump’s new import duties.

Read more...

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Within hours of taking office on Monday, Donald Trump released a raft of executive orders addressing targets he’d gone after throughout his campaign, such as immigration, government spending, and DEI. He issued full pardons for 1,500 January 6 rioters, and signed the first eight executive orders—of dozens so far—in front of a cheering crowd in a sports arena. But amid the deluge of actions, Trump also signed an executive order that takes aim at his own federal bureaucracy—and allows his perceived enemies within the government to be investigated and punished.

The executive order, titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” opens by stating as fact that the Biden administration and its allies used the government to take action against political opponents. Democrats, it says, “engaged in an unprecedented, third-world weaponization of prosecutorial power to upend the democratic process.” Its stated purpose, to establish “a process to ensure accountability for the previous administration’s weaponization of the Federal Government against the American people,” reads like a threat. The order calls out particular targets, including the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission—agencies that Trump and his supporters allege betrayed them under President Joe Biden. Trump’s team, led by whoever is appointed attorney general and director of national intelligence, will be sniffing out what it determines to be signs of political bias. These officials will be responsible for preparing reports to be submitted to the president, with recommendations for “appropriate remedial actions.”

What exactly those remedial actions would look like is not clear. The vagueness of the order could result in a “long-running, desultory ‘investigation,’” Quinta Jurecic, a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer to The Atlantic, told me in an email.

But the information gathered in such investigations could lead to some federal employees being publicly criticized or otherwise punished by Trump. And beyond theatrics, this order could open the door to the “prosecutions that Trump has threatened against his political opponents,” Jurecic noted. Put another way: In an executive order suggesting that Biden’s administration weaponized the government, Trump is laying out how his administration could do the same.

Trump’s Cabinet is still taking shape, and whoever ends up in the top legal and intelligence roles will influence how this order is executed. Pam Bondi, Trump’s attorney-general pick, is an established loyalist with long-standing ties to Trump (he reportedly considered her for the role in his first term, but worried that her past scandals would impede her confirmation). Bondi, in her first Senate confirmation hearing last week, attempted to downplay Trump’s persistent rhetoric on retribution, and avoided directly answering questions about how she, as head of the Justice Department, would engage with his plans to punish enemies. She said that she wouldn’t entertain hypotheticals about the president, though she did claim that “there will never be an enemies list within the Department of Justice.” Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, has a history of political shape-shifting, though she has lately shown fealty to MAGA world.

Well before Trump took office, his allies were signaling their interest in turning federal bureaucracy, which they deride as “the deep state,” into a system driven by unquestioning loyalty to the president. As my colleague Russell Berman wrote in 2023, some conservatives have argued, without even cloaking “their aims in euphemisms about making government more effective and efficient,” that bureaucrats should be loyal to Trump. Russ Vought, the nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (an unflashy but powerful federal position), who today appeared before Congress for the second time, has previously written that the executive branch should use “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

The executive order on weaponizing the federal government is consistent with the goals of retribution that Trump expressed on the campaign trail. And accusing rivals of using the government for personal ends has been a favored Republican tactic in recent years. Still, this order confirms that, now that he is back in office, Trump will have no qualms toggling the levers of executive power to follow through on his promises of revenge. Many of Trump’s executive actions this week are sending a clear message: If you are loyal, you are protected. If not, you may be under attack.

Related:

Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message. Why 2025 is different from 2017

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump’s second term might have already peaked. The attack on birthright citizenship is a big test for the Constitution. You’re being alienated from your own attention, Chris Hayes writes.

Today’s News

A shooter killed at least one student and injured another before killing himself at Antioch High School in Nashville. Donald Trump said last night that by February 1, he would place a 10 percent tariff on Chinese products. He has also pledged to put a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico by the same date. An Israeli military assault in the occupied West Bank began yesterday, killing at least 10 people and injuring 40 others, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Be Like Sisyphus

By Gal Beckerman

This anxious century has not given people much to feel optimistic about—yet most of us resist pessimism. Things must improve. They will get better. They have to. But when it comes to the big goals—global stability, a fair economy, a solution for the climate crisis—it can feel as if you’ve been pushing a boulder up a hill only to see it come rolling back down, over and over: all that distance lost, all that huffing and puffing wasted. The return trek to the bottom of the hill is long, and the boulder just sits there, daring you to start all over—if you’re not too tired.

Read the full article.

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Watch. I’m Still Here (out now in select theaters) tempts viewers into a comforting lull before pulling the rug out from under them, David Sims writes.

Examine. In an age of ideological conformity and technological brain-suck, the world needs more disobedient artists and thinkers, Jacob Howland writes.

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The purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was to settle once and for all the question of racial citizenship, forever preventing the subjugation of one class of people by another. Donald Trump’s executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship is an attempt to reverse one outcome of the Civil War, by creating a permanent underclass of stateless people who have no rights they can invoke in their defense.

In 1856, in the infamous Dred Scott decision that declared that Black people could not be American citizens, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that as “a subordinate and inferior class of beings,” Black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Yes, the Declaration of Independence had stated that “all men are created equal,” but “the enslaved African race were not intended to be included.”

Frederick Douglass, who argued that the Constitution did not sanction slavery, responded to the Taney decision by saying that one could find a defense of slavery in the Constitution only “by discrediting and casting away as worthless the most beneficent rules of legal interpretation; by disregarding the plain and common sense reading of the instrument itself; by showing that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and says what it does not mean, by assuming that the written Constitution is to be interpreted in the light of a secret and unwritten understanding of its framers, which understanding is declared to be in favor of slavery.” Sounds familiar.

[David A. Graham: It’s already different]

Trump’s executive order similarly rewrites the Constitution by fiat, something the president simply does not have the authority to do. The order, which purports to exclude the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants from citizenship, states that such children are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. and therefore not included in the amendment’s language extending citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This makes no sense on its own terms—as the legal scholar Amanda Frost wrote earlier this month, “Undocumented immigrants must follow all federal and state laws. When they violate criminal laws, they are jailed. If they park illegally, they are ticketed.” The ultraconservative Federal Judge James C. Ho observed in 2006 that “Text, history, judicial precedent, and Executive Branch interpretation confirm that the Citizenship Clause reaches most U.S.-born children of aliens, including illegal aliens.”

As such, Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship is an early test of the federal judiciary, and of the extent to which Republican-appointed judges and justices are willing to amend the Constitution from the bench just to give Trump what he wants. They have done so at least twice before, the first time by writing the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on insurrectionists running for office out of the Constitution, and the second time by seeking to protect Trump from prosecution by inventing an imperial presidential immunity out of whole cloth. But accepting Trump’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship would have more direct consequences for millions of people, by nullifying the principle that almost anyone born here is American.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, white southerners tried to restore, at gunpoint, the slave society that had existed prior to the war, notwithstanding the Thirteenth Amendment’s abolition of slavery. Republicans in Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to secure equal citizenship and the Fifteenth Amendment to protect the right to vote regardless of race, amendments that guaranteed political and civil equality. The Civil War amendments, the work of the Republican Party, are the cornerstone of multiracial democracy in the United States. Despite this historic accomplishment, for the past 80 years or so, the party of Lincoln has aimed its efforts at repealing or nullifying them.

“Adopted as part of the effort to purge the United States of the legacy of slavery, birthright citizenship, with which the Fourteenth Amendment begins, remains an eloquent statement about the nature of American society, a powerful force for assimilation of the children of immigrants, and a repudiation of a long history of racism,” the historian Eric Foner writes in The Second Founding, a history of the Civil War amendments, though he is cautious to note that these principles were not always respected by the government—Jim Crow and Japanese internment being obvious examples. Birthright citizenship was “a dramatic repudiation of the powerful tradition of equating citizenship with whiteness, a doctrine built into the naturalization process from the outset and constitutionalized by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott.”

This detachment of American citizenship from whiteness was one of the parts of the Fourteenth Amendment that Democrats, at the time the party of white supremacy, hated the most. “Democratic members of Congress repeatedly identified American nationality with ‘the Caucasian race,’ insisted that the government ‘was made for white men,’ and objected to extending the ‘advantages’ of American citizenship to ‘the Negroes, the coolies, and the Indians,’” Foner writes.

Trump’s immigration braintrust sees things similarly. In emails with conservative reporters, Trump’s point man on immigration, Stephen Miller, praised articles attacking the 1965 repeal of racist restrictions on immigration that had been passed in 1921 and were intended to keep out nonwhite people, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Jews. These laws again redefined American citizenship in racist terms, and helped inspire the Nazis. The end of those restrictions meant that more nonwhite immigrants were able to gain citizenship in the United States, a phenomenon conservatives have dubbed a “Great Replacement,” borrowing a concept from white-supremacist sources. That the Trump coalition now includes people who would have been shut out by Miller’s preferred immigration policies does not change the fact that Trump’s immigration advisers view the decline of the white share of the population as an apocalyptic occurrence that must be reversed. It is no accident that this project begins with the nullification of constitutional language guaranteeing citizenship regardless of race or country of origin.

[Martha S. Jones: The real origins of birthright citizenship]

Republicans have made significant inroads among nonwhite voters in the past few years. Their reasons for supporting Trump change neither the intent of his entourage nor the effects of his policies. A successful repeal of birthright citizenship would mean the so-called pro-life party creates a class of stateless infants, a shadow caste mostly unprotected by law. It would require Americans to prove their citizenship time and time again, and leave them vulnerable to administrative errors that could endanger proof of their status. These burdens would likely fall disproportionately on those nonwhite people Trumpists see as their “replacers,” no matter how enthusiastic about Trump they might be.

Since the rise of Trump, the once-fringe idea that the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on the children of undocumented immigrants has gained traction among ambitious conservatives whose malleable principles allow them to shape themselves to Trump’s whims. By November of 2024 the aforementioned Ho, who had previously written a detailed law-review article rejecting such theories, had become a bombastic, partisan Trumpist judge; he carefully retraced his steps and insisted that the birthright-citizenship clause doesn’t apply in the case of immigrant “invasion,” substituting Fox News talking points for legal reasoning.

This is the level of respect for the Constitution one can expect from conservative jurists in the Trump era. Whatever Trump says is correct. What the original framers of the Fourteenth Amendment understood was that the necessities of multiracial democracy demand more than bowing and scraping before this sort of lawlessness. For now, neither party’s political leadership seems up to the task.