Hope you had a good Thanksgiving. While millions of Americans were sitting down to festive meals yesterday, the President of These United States went on a racist tear. “What’s new?” you might ask. But, reader, this was unprecedented even for him. David Duke may be sitting at home right now, or perhaps on a Substack podcast, saying, brother, take it down a notch.

The impetus for the meltdown was the Thanksgiving Eve shooting of two National Guardsmen in downtown Washington, D.C. (One of the two, Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, has died; Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe remains in critical condition.) The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is a 29-year-old Afghan national who is widely reported to have served in a “Zero Unit” — one of the CIA-trained death squads that fought alongside American commandos and murdered hundreds of civilians during our 20-year war and occupation. He is said to have moved to the United States with his family during the U.S. withdrawal and was granted asylum in April, three months after Trump returned to office.

Trump’s spiral — first in a press conference, then in an unhinged series of late-night posts on Truth Social — immediately went way beyond Lakanwal, or even Afghan nationals in general. Triggered in part by a question on his own administration’s potential responsibility for having granted the suspected shooter asylum, Trump launched into a wild attack against all immigrants, his political enemies, and ultimately against the idea of America as a pluralistic nation of settlers as conceived by its founding generation two and a half centuries ago.

In the space of 511 words, Trump accused Americans of having “allow[ed] our Country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at” by immigrants — “most of which,” he said, are “on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”; accused Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) of both illegally immigrating and committing incest; called Minnesota governor and former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz “retarded”; announced a “permanent pause” on immigration from “all Third World Countries”; announced the cessation of “all Federal benefits” to “noncitizens of our Country”; said he planned to strip the citizenship of any immigrant who “undermine[s] domestic tranquility”; and to “deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.”

The president ended his rant (part I here, part II here) screaming: “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation” — a white nationalist concept that spread from an Austrian far-right party founded by a former Nazi SS officer to white supremacist movements in Europe and North America over the last few years.

I don’t know, and I don't care, whether Trump wrote all or even most of the rant himself. (The screeching about “Western Civilization” and the use of X-brained buzzwords and the Omar conspiracy theories suggest the hand of a relatively younger chud like Stephen Miller, though Trump has invoked the latter before.) The salient fact here is that the president put his name to a screed in which he announced plans to “denaturalize” — that is, take away the citizenship of — potentially tens of millions of Americans; blatantly violate the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment protections of millions more (the Constitution gives rights to “persons,” not citizens); and used language straight off of a Nazi imageboard. All in the name of responding to an Imperial Boomerang-coded attack¹ on National Guardsmen who shouldn’t have been in D.C. to begin with.

But the main thing that drove me to write this on a holiday weekend is to say that I don’t think it’s going to work. It’s annoying that legacy media are intent, as ever, to sanewash Trump’s racist rambling. It is sad that the American political sphere and its media apparatus swings into reflexive consent-manufacturing mode as soon as a shot rings out near a troop or a center of power, yet relegates the mounting numbers of masked ICE and CBP agents shooting wildly at, and sometimes killing, immigrants and U.S. citizens alike to local coverage that focuses on adjudicating the victims’ innocence or lack thereof.

It just doesn’t seem to be working. For the moment at least, judging from polls and growing resistance from corners not traditionally known for radicalism like childcare workers and suburban moms, Trump’s mass deportation scheme is wildly unpopular. Starving and immiserating noncitizens by taking away their legal SNAP, Medicaid, or CHIP benefits may play with the MAGA base. But to normal people, even those who could perhaps be persuaded to reduce refugee admissions, it’s just cruel. Start stripping the citizenship of friends, coworkers, fellow church, mosque, and synagogue-goers for using their legal federal benefits or doing whatever Stephen Miller thinks is “non-compatible with Western Civilization?” Trump could have a popular revolt on his hands. And that’s all before you get to the ways that the MAGA coalition itself seems to be fracturing over the Epstein Files, Venezuela adventurism, and the increasingly open levels of Nazi influence on the right.

That is not to say it couldn’t work. Given a big enough event — a 9/11, Maine, a Pearl Harbor — you can get Americans to sign on to a lot of cruelty in the name of promises of public safety. But Trump is lazy, impatient, and losing steam. His circle’s attempts to make the Charlie Kirk assassination into a Reichstag Fire moment claimed some victims but ultimately failed. And this isn’t even that. As horrible a tragedy as it is, it seems to me that too many of us are sadly too inured to mass shootings at this point for this one to crack apart increasingly baked-in perceptions of the issues that the administration is trying to center. And Trump — old, tired, and looking, for all his TRUMP 2028 posturing, like the lame duck he is constitutionally supposed to be — simply isn’t the salesman he once was.

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