Why does Donald Trump seem so cheerful? His poll numbers are sliding. His stop-go tariff strategy is a hot mess, already causing prices to rise. He has not kept his promise, as self-styled artist of the deal, to bring a swift peace to Ukraine and to the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, will take healthcare and food stamps from millions of working-class Trump voters. The conspiracist wing of the MAGA movement is enraged by the administration’s failure to disclose the promised files on Jeffrey Epstein; while America First isolationists are still fuming about last month’s US air strikes on Iran.
Yet, aside from his routine fury on Truth Social about Marxists, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and the comedian Rosie O’Donnell, and his occasional bouts of public outrage (at the expense of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval office, for instance), Trump appears much more genial and relaxed than he did in his first term.
More than ever, his standard register is shtick. Even during his visit on July 1 to “Alligator Alcatraz”, the new migrant detention centre in the Florida Everglades, his impulse was to find (tasteless) humour in this bleak setting.
“We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison,” he said. “Don’t run in a straight line. Run like this… And you know what? Your chances go up about 1%!”
The point being: this is not a worried man. Quite the opposite, in fact. The conventional explanation is that Trump is constitutionally unable to run for a third term and is therefore enjoying the freedoms of a lame duck president. Well, let’s not be too sanguine about that: he muses too often about staying in office after January 20, 2029 for anyone to assume he is simply trolling the world.
Second, and correctly, it is pointed out that, more than eight months after their comprehensive defeat, the Democrats are still absolutely nowhere, oscillating between snarky contempt and aphasic fatalism. To the extent that they have a playbook of any sort it is 10 years old: condemning Trump as incompetent, nasty and a threat to democracy. All of which is true, but manifestly inadequate as a message to regain office.
In any case: I think there is more to it than that. Trump is looking more comfortable because he is less worried than ever about the normal pressures of accountability. It has long been speculated that his intention, instinctive rather than calculated, is to steer the US towards what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have called “competitive authoritarianism”: a hybrid system in which democratic procedures are notionally observed but the regime is clearly autocratic – Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary being obvious examples.
What is the first thing that such a regime needs? The answer is clear: a private army that is primarily loyal to the strong man leader rather than to the letter of the law, due process or the constitution.
Now look at the recently passed legislation and its highest priorities. In a post on X on July 1, vice-president JD Vance gave the game away: “Everything else… is immaterial compared to the ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] money and immigration enforcement provisions”.
Under the provisions of the act, more than $170bn is allocated to ICE, which will now have more money to spend over the next four years than the FBI, ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), Bureau of Prisons and US Marshals combined.
Or, put another way, ICE will have an annual budget of $37.5bn – $7bn more than Israel spends on defence each year. No such agency in history has been so spectacularly well-funded.
“Detention capacity expansion” will account for $45bn of the new money – a bonanza for corporations that build such facilities. There is also funding for 10,000 new agents, with provision for $10,000 bonuses.
The political mastermind of this transformative strategy is Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and the most consequential policymaker in his administration. In May, he made it furiously clear to senior ICE officers that his target of one million deportations per year was deadly serious.
In an unsettling echo of Stalin’s quotas for purges and arrests, Miller cares much more about numbers than the tedious business of habeas corpus and due process. He seeks to inflict blunt force trauma upon what he regards as a flabby liberal consensus on citizenship, border control and the very character of American society.
Hence, ICE has shifted its focus from criminal fugitives and gangs to places of work, education and worship. Many undocumented migrants have been detained when reporting for routine appointments regarding their residential status.
It is a measure of the fear sown by this street-level campaign that, last week, Bishop Alberto Rojas of the Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino in southern California took the exceptional step of excusing his 1.5 million parishioners – many of them Latino – from the obligation of attending mass weekly and making themselves vulnerable to deportation sweeps.
For similar reasons, many shops, restaurants and bars in cities and towns with a high density of migrant residents remain shuttered. Understandably so, in the light of a newly disclosed memo from acting ICE director Todd M Lyons that immigrants may be deported to countries other than their own with as little as six hours’ notice.
A fanatical nativist, Miller truly believes that his home state of California has been wrecked by lax border control and that America can be returned to a state of grace by the deportation of up to 20 million migrants. He also hopes that the shock-and-awe tactics of ICE will encourage “self-deportation” – additionally incentivised by state subsidy of travel, a $1,000 “exit bonus” and forgiveness of fines.
But if ICE is nothing more than a migration enforcement agency, why do its agents wear masks? In response to this all-important question, Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, angrily claims that its officers have faced an alleged 700% increase in assaults and require anonymity to protect themselves and their families.
In a podcast with Politico’s Dasha Burns posted on Sunday, he went further. “The same people complaining about ICE wearing masks, have they ever said anything about BLM protesters wearing masks?” he said. “Did anybody ever propose legislation saying it’s illegal to wear a mask in public while you’re protesting?”
Thus does the belligerent populist deflect from the most important question: why are federal agents leaping from SUVs and lifting individuals from the street without identifying themselves? For people of colour, of course, the mask is horrifically reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan’s hood. But it also violates every principle of accountable law enforcement. It symbolises a sharp shift towards arbitrary policing.
For now, the primary task of radically expanded ICE is mass deportation. But the allocation of funds to detention – greater than the gutted USAID budget – suggests a broader remit. Trump is openly toying with the idea of “denaturalisation”: which is to say, stripping citizenship from those who already hold it.
Extraordinarily, his administration has raised the possibility of denaturalising Zohran Mamdani, the left wing Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, on the spurious grounds that he concealed his support for “terrorism” when seeking citizenship in 2018.
In such threats are embedded the prospect of a fundamental change in what it means to be a US citizen: its mutation from a legal and constitutional status to something much more provisional and dependent upon political obedience.
The word “invasion” has already been hijacked to apply to all undocumented migrants; and now the line between residential status and political opinion is being blurred. What started as a border crisis is becoming, incrementally, a paramilitary campaign to impose collective loyalty to one man.
As Hannah Arendt warned in her classic account of totalitarianism and its roots, such a regime needs a dedicated enforcement agency as “the power nucleus of the country”. Its primary mission is not to enforce the law but to act as “the executors and guardians of [the state’s] domestic experiment in constantly transforming reality into fiction”. This task is aggressively psychological – to impose the will of the state, however capricious or unjust – rather than narrowly constitutional.
In this regard, the warnings of history are bleakly relevant. Mussolini’s squadristi were the basis of his fascistic power. Hitler deployed the paramilitary Freikorps ruthlessly to undermine the Weimar Republic, hailing its members as “swift as greyhounds, tough as leather, hard as Krupp steel”.
Never forget Trump’s equivocal response to the far right violence at Charlottesville in 2017; or his instruction to the Proud Boys militia in 2020, speaking as if their commander, to “stand back and stand by”. Above all, the mass pardoning of nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists on his first day back in office was not only a legal outrage. It was also a signal to those who, in pursuit of Trump’s objectives, might bend or break the law in the future, that he would use the might of his office to protect them from the liberal courts and the deep state.
Those who say that ICE will have difficulty recruiting new agents argue that its regular salary range of between $50,000 and $90,000 compares poorly to, say, the New York Police Department, where an officer may be earning more than $125,000 in less than six years.
But it is also a mistake to underestimate the fundamental role that status has always played in the growth of private armies and militias. ICE agents do not have to chase parking tickets, intervene in neighbourhood arguments, identify themselves, or answer to local politicians.
As Homan declares proudly, they “don’t need probable cause”. Macho impunity is his brand. Heckled at a Turning Point USA event in Tampa, Florida, on Saturday, he replied scornfully: “You want some? Come get some!” The message is: we are untouchable.
Such licence has always appealed to a certain kind of young man, looking for power, camaraderie and identity. Remember the way in which President Buzz Windrip addresses his own militia in Sinclair Lewis’s great dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935):
“I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in America! To you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land again. You have been scorned. They thought you were the ‘lower classes’. They wouldn’t give you jobs. They told you to sneak off like bums and get relief… They said you were no good, because you were poor. I tell you that you are… the highest lords of the land – the aristocracy – the makers of the new America of freedom and justice.”
The words are fiction, 90 years old, but they might have been spoken by Trump himself. On July 5, he posted “a big “THANK YOU!” to the Heroic ICE Officers fighting every day to reclaim our Sovereignty and Freedom… Our Brave ICE Officers, who are under daily violent assault, will finally have the tools and support that they need. We will not let America become a Third World Country filled with Crime, failing Schools, collapsing Hospitals, and total Social Dysfunction. It’s called ‘REMIGRATION’ and, it will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on June 10, he praised them as “the toughest people you’ll ever meet – and they love our country”. On that occasion, he was speaking to an audience of regular soldiers. But he was boasting about his own private army.
As Trump’s foremost chronicler, Michael Wolff, said to TNW founder and editor-in-chief Matt Kelly and me in the episode of The Two Matts posted on March 4, this president thrives on conflict. In this case, he and his supporters are choreographing a state of civil strife – a potential precursor to civil war – between the federal government and so-called “sanctuary politicians” who refuse to cooperate with ICE.
Top of their list are the local authorities in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, and Maryland – states that nationalist podcaster Steve Bannon has categorised as “neo-Confederate” on the grounds that they are resisting federal jurisdiction. This is a grotesque act of historical misappropriation, given that the original Confederacy seceded to protect slavery. But it shows how far MAGA is prepared to go in its rhetoric to justify what ICE is now doing.
Trump’s deportation plans are horrendous and have already involved much human suffering and flagrant injustice. But the dramatic build-up of this enforcement agency is not, in the end, about border control or even nativism. It is about power, and one man’s grip upon it.
With a fast-growing private army behind him, the question is not only what Trump is planning to do next but what could conceivably stop him; and who will protect those whom he decides, on a whim, are his enemies. He promised to end the forever wars abroad. What he did not say was that the new forever war would be fought at home.
