When Donald Trump looks at the globe, what does he see? We know that in the president’s eyes, other nations may be abject “shithole countries,” shiny real-estate opportunities, or potential candidates for the 51st state. There’s no question that people, goods, and ideas from other lands are less welcome in the United States than they once were. But for all his purported anti-globalism, Trump is no isolationist: Foreign states are still useful things. In his first few weeks in office, Trump has shown us how, in spite of its fixation on borders, the MAGA movement is embracing its own version of globalization.

Trump’s is not a politics of international cooperation and mutual support, as the cuts to USAID and digs against NATO make clear. Nor does he defer to corporate hegemony: He has no problem banning foreign businesses and threatening multinationals with tariffs. He seems to approach the world, rather, as a wily oligarch does—juggling offshore trusts, fictitious addresses, and numbered accounts to avoid taxes, litigation, and the rules and responsibilities that come with living in a society.

I’ve spent much of my career as a journalist reporting on the shadowy offshore world and its protagonists: the people who built it, the countries complicit in the system, the firms and oligarchs that profit from it, and the groups and individuals who get caught in the cracks. I recognize in Trump’s recent incursions a line of reasoning that I’ve encountered time and time again: that if you’re incredibly rich, cruel, or clever, the world can be your loophole.

Trump’s foreign policy treats the nations of the world less as sovereign, independent nations than as sites of arbitrage, evasion, and extraction. Call it “national globalism”: the pursuit of extraterritorial space to advance American interests.

The new administration’s international agenda so far has—not coincidentally—disproportionately focused on vulnerable territories that share a defining feature: They might offer the U.S. ways around rules, treaties, costs, regulations, or even the Constitution itself. Greenland. Gaza. El Salvador. The Panama Canal.

The most glaring example is Guantánamo Bay, which received its first planeload of undocumented migrants from the U.S. early this month. As of Friday, at least 126 migrants were detained at the naval station; Trump says it will accommodate 30,000. It’s not hard to guess what Trump hopes to achieve there, because the station has served a similar purpose before.

Most people associate Guantánamo with the War on Terror. But the U.S. has occupied the naval base for more than a century—renting it from the Cuban government consensually from 1903 to 1959, then somewhat less so once the Cuban Revolution scorched diplomatic relations.

[Read: The never-ending Guantanamo trials]

Gitmo’s physical location in the Caribbean is strategically useful, of course. But its unique legal geography is an added perk: Being neither entirely “domestic” (the U.S. does not own it) nor “foreign” (Cuba does not control it), Guantánamo is a liminal space. It is out of sight, out of mind, and a perfect place to try to evade accountability.

In the ’90s, tens of thousands of Cuban and Haitian asylum seekers escaping political violence found themselves rerouted to Guantánamo. Many became trapped in what lawyers described as a “legal black hole,” detained in squalid camps, and denied the usual legal process to claim asylum. One lawyer representing a group of 158 Haitian detainees, many of them HIV positive, who were prevented from leaving the camp for 20 months, compared the conditions to Dante’s ninth circle of hell. The Clinton administration agreed to follow a judge’s order to free them in 1993—but only on the condition that the court would strike the case from precedent. The migrant detentions went on.

The U.S. government will not identify the migrants it’s now imprisoning at Gitmo. The ACLU and others have sued to get them access to lawyers, alleging that the detainees are already “incommunicado.” It’s unclear what will happen to these people—not least because they have already been on U.S. soil—but the camp’s location, culture of secrecy, and dark history will make accountability much harder to come by.

Gitmo isn’t America’s only plan for offshoring migrants. Panama has accepted more than 100 deportees originally from China, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, “has agreed to the most unprecedented, extraordinary, extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio said. Bukele’s administration has become synonymous with a brutal crackdown on crime. It’s conducted mass trials and been accused by Amnesty International of torturing prisoners in its overcrowded prisons. Now, in return for assistance developing its nuclear-energy program, El Salvador’s government has offered to put up America’s unwanted migrants—and potentially, U.S. citizens with convictions, too—in its jails, under its laws.

Last month, Trump said he wanted the U.S. to take control of the Panama Canal. Of course he did. Though the canal belongs to Panama, the U.S. built and governed it for much of the 20th century, and it now serves as the world’s second-largest free-trade zone, governed by an autonomous (albeit Panamanian) government agency. Trump also ordered Panama to sever ties with China, which controls ports adjacent to the canal via a Hong Kong company, and insisted that Panama stop charging U.S. vessels to use the thoroughfare. This is national globalism: free passage for me but not for thee (and definitely not for Xi).

It is unclear how seriously the Panamanians are taking this request, but even if they complied, it wouldn’t amount to much: There are only 185 U.S.-flagged cargo ships in the world. That’s because, under international law, shipowners can have their pick of flags, and given the choice, most opt for cheaper, less-regulated ones, like that of the Marshall Islands (which claims more than 4,000 vessels), Liberia (more than 5,000), or Panama itself (more than 8,000). Flags of convenience are a prototypical example of national globalism: the bald use of another country’s sovereignty to advance one’s own commercial interests. The practice of “flagging out” was, in fact, pioneered by American businesses in the 1920s and ’30s as a way to evade Prohibition, and later New Deal–era worker protections.

Trump’s proposal to take over Greenland reflects a similarly cavalier approach to sovereignty, but with murkier aims. Is it a real-estate play? A bid for rare-earth minerals? A tacit acknowledgment that climate change will alter shipping routes forevermore? Or is it all about some libidinal masculine desire for a new frontier?

That Trump will actually buy or invade the Danish territory is quite unlikely. But that he chose it as his target at all is instructive. Greenland is a sparsely populated former colony that enjoys a high degree of self-rule while depending on Denmark for its security. Greenland, like Gitmo and the Panama Canal, can be seen in the national-globalist imagination as betwixt and between—a natural place to exploit.

Then there’s Gaza. After close to a brutal year and a half of violence there, Trump entered the chat. First, he declared that the U.S. would simply take Gaza over and build a “Riviera of the Middle East” that could be filled with expats and multinational businesses. To do that, he said, Gazans would have to vacate (many would call a population transfer of this magnitude, with these intentions, ethnic cleansing). It’s highly unlikely that any of this will happen, but again, it makes sense that he seized upon a territory that world leaders have gone out of their way to classify as liminal, indeterminate, or somehow sub- or extra-national, against the wishes of the Palestinians who live there.  

Trump is certainly not the first national globalist, nor is America the first state to embrace practices such as sending migrants to third countries.

Italy recently established a camp in Albania, for instance, and Israel has deported hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Uganda. Since 2001, Australia has, on and off, diverted asylum seekers to squalid detention centers in the nearby nation of Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. The camps were directly inspired by Guantánamo. Australia offered the host states a cynical win-win: The poorer countries would get money to operate prisons, and Australia could make an example of a few thousand people, some of whom lived in the camps for years. Offshoring migrants also allowed Australia to claim it was not responsible for them under international law: After all, they were not on Australian land. Today, the majority have been resettled—but not in Australia.

In an analogous scandal that began in 2008 but is still ongoing, some 40,000 stateless people in the United Arab Emirates have semi-forcibly been given passports from Comoros, a nation they have never known, just so they can remain classified as “foreign” nationals without citizenship rights in the UAE.

National globalism is wily that way. It uses foreignness and territorial indeterminacy to its advantage. And no nation has mastered it better than the country Trump sees as America’s most threatening competitor—China.

The use of specialized carve-outs has helped China attract industry: through semiautonomous territories such as Hong Kong, which offers common-law courts and low taxes, and enclaves such as Shenzhen, which since the ’70s has been more open than the rest of China to foreign businesses and migrants. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which finances foreign ports, infrastructure, and real-estate developments in other countries to advance its own economic interest, can be seen as a much more ambitious version of what Trump might hope to achieve in Greenland and Panama. (Ironically, the overseas Chinese projects were themselves conceived to counter U.S. influence in the region.) On the borders of Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar, Chinese companies have invested in the creation of quasi-extraterritorial cities where they can invest currency and where gambling, scams, and other kinds of illicit activity are common.

Some of China’s partners, like Kazakhstan, are willing, if not equal, participants; others, like Laos, are poor and small and don’t have much choice. There are more than 50 Chinese special economic zones in Africa. What’s always clear is who’s calling the shots.

The philosophy of national globalism—a combination of nationalism, mercantilist economics, and neocolonial exploitation—is what unites the flags of convenience and the billionaires hoarding their art collections in top-secret Swiss warehouses. The defining feature of the national-globalist worldview is this: Land and law are not, and should not, be inextricably linked. If your own law doesn’t work for you, you can find a better one in another country or jurisdiction: moving your assets offshore, renouncing your citizenship and buying a new passport, or, if you’re a government, moving entire populations to a place where you are not technically responsible. These maneuvers purport to follow the letter of the law, but they don’t embody its spirit; the Australian refugee-law scholar Daniel Ghezelbash calls it hyperlegalism.

It’s unclear how much of these ideas Trump will carry out abroad. But he isn’t confining himself to other countries. He’s ready to bring national globalism home.

In 2023, Trump pledged to build “freedom cities” on federal land that would “reopen the frontier” and, presumably, free businesses from the usual rules and regulations. “Freedom Cities could address two major challenges confronting the United States: a sclerotic bureaucracy and a stagnant society,” wrote Mark Lutter and Nick Allen, experts who promote special economic zones like China’s.

The irony, of course, is that carving out land for deregulated islands of industry is how other countries sought to attract American industry in the first place. It worked because it lowered costs and unleashed a regulatory race to the bottom. What Trump would actually be doing is bringing the long hours, low wages, and poor conditions of offshore jobs back home to America.

By picking and choosing which rules to play by—foreign, domestic, or something conveniently in between—national globalism undermines democratic rule, replacing the idea of “one land, one law, one people” with something fractured and piecemeal.

Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order exemplifies this. The Fourteenth Amendment says that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” That’s universality based on territory: Being born here is enough.

Does birthright occasionally grant citizenship to people born here by chance? Absolutely. Is it a perfectly fair system? No. But what is citizenship if not chance?

The Trump administration has made the specious claim that children born to people without the right documentation are somehow not under its jurisdiction, and could therefore see their citizenship claims denied, or perhaps even have their citizenship revoked. If nothing else, it is a transparent effort to establish two classes of people. And for national globalists, only one of them matters.

When I was living in West Philadelphia during graduate school, I noticed that my neighborhood abounded with ornately decorated Victorian-style porches, many of which featured ceilings painted in a calm shade of blue, somewhere between periwinkle and a light teal. When I asked a neighbor about what I took to be a trend, she regaled me with the history of a color she called “haint blue”—a story about the violence of indigo production in the South Carolina Low Country, and the never-ending Black quest for safety and protection.

I remembered this experience vividly as I read Imani Perry’s new book, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, which collects personal anecdotes, local and regional vignettes, and snippets of global Black history since the 15th century. Perry, an Atlantic contributing writer and a National Book Award–winning author, fills her latest work with accounts of ingenuity and Black resilience that are held together, loosely but intentionally, with threads of cerulean, sapphire, and azure. What might, on the surface, look like an arbitrary correlation coheres into a revelatory entry point for contemplating the Black experience.

Perry’s wide-ranging study seems to take inspiration from blues music, a genre that melds Black suffering with Black pride. And as I read the book, the origin story of haint blue kept flitting across my memory because it, too, evokes that duality. The color’s prevalence on porch ceilings can be traced back to the spiritual practices of the Gullah Geechee people—descendants of Africans trafficked to the southeastern United States in the 1700s who believed that hues resembling the ocean or the sky could confuse evil spirits and keep them away. At the time, haint blue could be made only by cultivating and processing indigo plants, which was a labor-intensive, often dangerous endeavor undertaken by enslaved workers in antebellum America. Crops had to be cut, stacked, and heated in vats that attracted vermin and were a breeding ground for viruses. The stench that arose from the putrefying indigo plants could be unbearable. Livestock and humans alike became sick.

Though the color was a product of enslavement, it was a “source of pleasure” too. As Perry writes, those who found comfort in this particular shade knew that “they were not mere chattel, and their lives would not be only joyless burden.” Even within the labor that degraded them, enslaved people found splendor and self-regard, something to admire in the products of their dehumanization.

[Read: Racism is terrible. Blackness is not.]

Wherever she looked in historical archives, Perry encountered vibrant tones of blue woven into the history of Black lives. She found indigo on the knife of the woman who trained Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first Haitian emperor, in combat. Hunters and riflewomen in the West African kingdom of Dahomey wore blue shorts and sometimes blue blouses as part of their uniforms. Nat King Cole’s cool emanated, at least in part, from the “turquoise-hued Newports” and “brilliant blue Kools” that he regularly smoked.

Though each chapter of Black in Blues locates the color somewhere in the story it tells—the pale blue of jasperware pots; the dark blue in the gums of those most “murderous” of Black people, according to both Black and white folklore; the cobalt blue of bottles hung on crepe-myrtle trees in the Deep South, also meant to ward off evil—the color itself often feels ancillary to the real subject of Perry’s book.

While working on it, Perry realized that she “didn’t want to write an exegesis on blue.” Instead, the form of her project more closely resembles a blues composition; reading it calls to mind one of Ma Rainey’s songs of anguish and exuberance or Miles Davis’s mercurial trumpet solos. Blues music captures the stunning complexity of navigating a freedom forever tied to a history of enslavement. As the music critic Albert Murray once argued, “Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence.”

Perry arranges her exploration of Black history in a way that may seem formless but could be described as a meticulously arranged series of “blue notes”—those tones in blues music that are played or sung slightly below what one might expect. As Perry explains, the blue note refuses stability or cohesion: “It is a flexible relation to the scale, and the most African of interventions into Western music … A blued note is so distinctive that someone who knows nothing about music, formally speaking, can hear it is special.” Perry suggests that the everyday improvisations of the enslaved could be described as “blue note living”: the dances that expressed bodily autonomy, the laughter that overtook immense pain, the projections of curiosity and tenderness in the face of brutality. Over the course of the book, Perry builds her case for how Black people have always functioned as blue notes—often seen as out of place or deviant but also known to wrest mellifluousness from cacophony and escape the binds that have been violently placed upon them.

Take George Washington Carver, the eccentric Black scientist who, in the early 20th century, helped popularize peanut butter and discovered many other uses for peanuts, both industrial and cosmetic. His work with the legume might be his claim to fame, but Perry chooses to pay attention to lesser-known aspects of his persona and life: his surprisingly high voice; his keen interest in the natural healing properties of various plants; the gossip he endured about his sexuality. He was also a talented craftsman who wove and embroidered intricate patterns that Perry describes as “living fractals.” He made paint from sweet-potato skins and tomato vines, and even resurrected Egyptian blue, a striking shade that had been invented in Ancient Egypt, by oxidizing Alabama clay. Born into slavery, Carver lived a simple life with global implications; he found magnificence in the ordinary.

[Read: Nikki Giovanni’s wondrous celebrations of Black life]

Black in Blues begins and ends with intimate histories of some of the people Perry admires most—her family, and those she has encountered through her academic work. One of the last chapters features a man known as Brother Blue—a performer, educator, and family friend who was a semipermanent figure in and around Harvard Square until his death in 2009. Brother Blue frequently walked the streets sharing folk wisdom with the residents of Boston and Cambridge while donning “a soft blue denim shirt and pants, a blue tam on his head, with streamers of all colors hanging off his clothes.” He pinned blue and rainbow-colored butterflies to his clothes and wore no shoes in order to be one with the earth, what he would call sacred ground.

For Perry, Brother Blue embodied “blue note living.” He served in World War II, overcame a stutter as an actor, and defended his doctoral dissertation by performing with a 25-piece jazz orchestra at a Boston prison—before being interrupted by an inmate revolt. Throughout his remarkable life, he insisted that authentic storytelling was crucial to Black life. As Perry reminisces, “He taught me that all stories are ours—meaning Black folks’—even when they came from the very people who mean to keep us down and out. What matters is the telling, meaning the integrity of our voices.”

Perry’s memory of Brother Blue’s teachings resonates with the end of Langston Hughes’s 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which the poet writes that Black people must be willing to “express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.” Hughes, too, saw the blues as integral to that endeavor, calling for “the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith singing the blues” to express both the beauty and suffering of Black life. Perry’s book does just that: It is attuned to the high, the low, and the blue notes that compose Blackness—and we would all do well to listen.

In the first week of the US president's second term, officials reported the deportation of some 7,300 people of different nationalities.

On Sunday night, in the basement ballroom of the Salamander Hotel in Washington, D.C., Charlie Kirk was happier than I’d ever seen him. “I truly believe that this is God’s grace on our country, giving us another chance to fight and to flourish,” Kirk, the head of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth-outreach organization, said to cheers from the hundreds of MAGA loyalists who had come out for his pre-inaugural ball. “What we are about to experience is a new golden era, an American renaissance.”

The celebrations have continued now that Donald Trump is back in the White House, as he has signed a flurry of executive orders to make good on his campaign promises. But this might be the best mood that MAGA world will be in for a while. The president’s coalition is split between two distinct but overlapping factions that are destined for infighting. On one side are the far-right nationalists and reactionaries who have stood by Trump since he descended down his golden escalator. Among them are Stephen Miller, who is seen as a chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, and Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and the former executive chair of Breitbart News. On the other side is the tech right: Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley elites, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, who have become ardent supporters of the president. Already, these groups are butting heads on key aspects of Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Trump’s second term, not everyone can win.

During the campaign, it was easy for these two groups to be aligned in the goal of electing Trump. Members of the nationalist wing took glee in how Musk boosted their ideology on X, the social platform he owns. With his more than 200 million followers, Musk has helped spread far-right conspiracy theories, such as the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating people’s pets. Meanwhile, the tech right has relished attacks on DEI efforts in the workplace—attacks that have allowed them to more easily walk back hiring practices, against the wishes of their more liberal employees.

But the two groups also want different things. The nationalist right wants an economy that prioritizes and assists American-born families (specifically, traditional nuclear ones), sometimes at the expense of business interests; the tech right wants a deregulated economy that bolsters its bottom line. The nationalist right wants to stop almost all immigration; the tech right wants to bring in immigrant workers as it pleases. The nationalist right wants to return America to a pre-internet era that it perceives as stable and prosperous; the tech right wants to usher in a bold, globally focused new economy.   

Already, the cracks have started to show. Last month, Trump’s pick of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan as an AI adviser led to a bitter and very public spat between the two camps over visas for highly skilled immigrants. (“FUCK YOURSELF in the face,” Musk at one point told his critics on the right.) At the time, I argued that the MAGA honeymoon is over. The disagreements have only intensified. Last week, after former President Joe Biden used his farewell speech to warn about the influence of Silicon Valley oligarchs and the “tech industrial complex,” the white-nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes posted on X that “Biden is right.” Bannon in particular has not relented: Earlier this month, he told an Italian newspaper that Musk is a “truly evil person” and that would get the billionaire “kicked out” of Trump’s orbit by Inauguration Day. (Considering that Musk is reportedly getting an office in the West Wing, Bannon does not seem to have been successful in that quest.) In an interview with my colleagues Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, Bannon described the tech titans as “nerds” whom Trump was humiliating. Seeing them on Inauguration Day was “like walking into Teddy Roosevelt’s lodge and seeing the mounted heads of all the big game he shot,” Bannon said.

In a sense, he is right. During the inauguration ceremony, tech billionaires—including Musk, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook—sat directly behind Trump’s family on the dais. They are not all as forcefully pro-Trump as Musk, but they have cozied up to the president by dining with him at Mar-a-Lago and making million-dollar donations to his inaugural fund (in some cases from their personal bank accounts, and in others from the corporations they head).

In doing so, they’ve gotten his ear and can now influence the president in ways that might not line up with the priorities of the nationalist right. On Monday, during his first press conference from the White House this term, Trump defended the H-1B visa program: “We want competent people coming into our country,” he said. Later, Bannon responded on his podcast, lamenting the “techno-feudalists” to whom Trump is apparently listening.

Both factions still have overlapping interests. They are both fed up with a country that they see as having grown weak and overly considerate to the needs of the vulnerable, at the expense of the most productive. America lacks a “masculine energy,” as Zuckerberg recently put it. Some members in both camps seem interested in trying to reconcile their differences, or at least in not driving the wedge further. On the eve of the inauguration, just before Turning Point USA’s ball, the right-wing publishing house Passage Publishing held its own ball in D.C.—an event intended to be a night when “MAGA meets the Tech Right.” The head of Passage Publishing, Jonathan Keeperman, has been keen on playing peacemaker. Last month, he went on Kirk’s podcast and tried to frame the debate over visas as one where his reactionary, nativist wing of the right could find common cause with the tech right. By limiting immigration and “developing our own native-born” STEM talent, he said, Silicon Valley can “win the AI arms race.”

Kirk couldn’t keep his frustration toward the tech elite from seeping out. “Big Tech has censored us and smeared us and treated us terribly,” he said. “Why would we then accommodate their policy wishes?” It’s easy to imagine Musk asking the same question. He and his peers run some of the most powerful companies in the world. They’re not going to give that up because a few  people, on the very platforms that they own, told them to. Each side is steadfast in what it wants, and won’t easily give in.

We already can guess how this will end. During his first administration, despite making populist promises on the campaign trail, Trump eventually sided with the wealthy. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist during the start of his first term, pushed for tax hikes on the wealthy. Seven months into his presidency, Trump fired him, and then proceeded to pass tax cuts. In his new administration, the nationalist right will certainly make gains—it is thrilled with Trump’s moves around birthright citizenship and his pledge to push forward with mass deportations. But if it’s ever in conflict with what Trump’s rich advisers in the tech world want, good luck.

Remember, it was Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk who sat on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Bannon, Keeperman, and Kirk were nowhere in sight.