You can see this tension playing out in the strange tweets that Karoline Leavitt, the 27-year-old White House press secretary, unleashed as she announced that Trump is now raining down thunder on migrants. “The largest massive deportation operation in history is well underway,” Leavitt gushed, enthusing about the use of “military aircraft” to remove “illegal immigrant criminals.”
It is only under Trump, you see, that we have begun deporting migrants on big, powerful-looking planes, and the entire world had better pay attention. Except this is all nonsense. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Counsel pointed out, the United States has been removing migrants on planes for many years, and the Biden administration, to its discredit, also drew attention to such flights. What makes the Trumpian version so galling is the suggestion that this is his innovation, and that carrying it out on military planes is something that only Trump is tough enough to undertake.
Yet this joyous feting of Trump’s power and strength as he begins his mass deportations amounts to something much darker—and a lot more telling, too.
The imagery of military planes at the border, then, is not just MAGA bread-and-circuses stuff. By sustaining the impression of this “invasion,” it’s also about manufacturing a pretext for the broader public to justify the assumption of extraordinarily sweeping powers that are very likely illegal.
Note that during his four years as president, Biden deported more people than Trump did during his first term. Trump and his advisers criticize Biden for deprioritizing the removals of longtime residents, and his border czar has vowed to sweep much more broadly. That was fun and games during the campaign, when no one had to think about what this would actually mean. But barely days after Trump won the election, numerous Republicans—and localities and industries in red states, from construction to food production—suddenly began suffering misgivings, letting it be known that mass removals in their communities would create major economic disruptions.
“Can we expect this administration to be raiding farms and going after the immigrant farm workers?” he asked.
In other words, mass deportations do threaten widespread economic damage. The only ways to avoid this, of course, are to not carry out removals of all undocumented immigrants, or to do it in such a way that favored industries are not targeted by them. Which constitutes an admission that ejecting undocumented immigrants entirely is a terrible idea, and that many play critical roles in our economy and society.
Political theorist Thomas Zimmer recently observed that the propaganda of authoritarian leaders sometimes suffers from a deep contradiction. On the one hand, the justification for carrying out expulsions and purgings of undesirable populations—for assuming extraordinary authorities or undertaking potentially illegal actions against them—must rest on depicting them as a massive internal threat. On the other, the leader must perpetually be depicted as powerful and strong, which requires demonstrating that he is mercilessly and successfully crushing that threat. Yet that in turn requires forever finding new ways to replenish the sense of emergency the original threat was supposed to create.
Yet this ruse cannot be sustained indefinitely: What happens when the deportations actually do start targeting those migrants who—by the admission of Trump’s own incoming agriculture secretary—are necessary to keep the food coming to our tables? How will Trump and his propagandists keep manufacturing the rationale for a military-style response at that point? And if we’re still under “invasion,” won’t Trump have failed to achieve the glorious pacification he promised us?
The buffoonish quality of all these follies already makes it plain: No amount of determined propaganda from the likes of Leavitt will be able to paper over these glaring contradictions forever.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Trump Aide Karoline Leavitt’s Creepy Flattery of Him Takes a Dark Turn )
Also on site :