The narrow Republican congressional majority has passed, by an even narrower majority, an enormous megabill. The unpopularity of its substance was swept under the rug on Trump’s say-so, for this was. “As the President said, it’s his bill. It’s not a House bill, it’s not a Senate bill,” noted House Speaker Mike Johnson. Coverage of the bill has focused on cuts to Medicaid and handouts to the rich. Less noted, but no less significant, is the enormous infusion of cash into immigration enforcement that will have lasting implications for our system of government and our society.
Among the charges leveled at King George III in the Declaration of Independence was that “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” The founding generation sought to create a large, commercial republic, where freedom of movement was an important pillar of national health.
Our president would like to see immigration control budgets on par with that of a branch of the military.
Instead, our current president and his party have put budgets for immigration control on par with that of a branch of the military. Rather than making war with foreign adversaries, they are making war at home, aiming to invest tens of billions of dollars — a little over a quarter of the immigration control budget — just in building detention camps.
Two hundred forty-nine years since our country declared its independence from the crown, the United States finds itself saddled with a would-be king of its own making.
President Donald Trump is a man who, as a private citizen and in public office, judges the value of people and things according to their use — and more than that, their subordination — to his person, and his person alone. Kings need not pretend otherwise, for they enjoy the legal fiction that the good of their person is the good of the polity.
But American presidents are supposed to be different. They are supposed to serve the people — to be our agent, one who can be removed if he isn’t performing his duties lawfully and to the best of his abilities.
The founding generation envisioned a Congress that was the first branch of government, a place where ambitious statesmen would be a natural check on other ambitious statesmen — ambitious presidents especially. Even as they failed to anticipate the development of party politics, the loose and geographically varied nature of American parties led to many cases of presidents’ being checked by their own parties in Congress.
Today — for the Republican Party, specifically — that is no longer possible. Even out of power, even as seemingly disgraced as he was after Jan. 6 — even after he seemed to be a specifically electoral loser for the party in both 2020 and 2022 — Donald Trump successfully consolidated his control of the GOP. Now, his approval ratings are sinking fast, and even the issues like immigration on which he had polled the strongest are underwater.
But Congress has passed a clearly unpopular and nakedly authoritarian bill, for no other reason than that Donald Trump wants it. Such obsequiousness is as shameful as it is un-American. The nearly 2½ centuries of American history were not without their troubles and their wrong turns. Slavery, civil war and segregation are undeniable blots on the record. Nor have we been unwaveringly open to people from other places and cultures — from the Know Nothing Party to the Chinese Exclusion Act to Operation Wetback, our history is heavy with making war at home in various guises. Congress is moving forward to pass a clearly unpopular and nakedly authoritarian bill, for no other reason than that Donald Trump wants it. It is a central paradox of our country that some of the very same people who participated in the worst of our history also had large hands in the best of it. Slave owners like Jefferson articulated an egalitarian ideal that would be taken up by abolitionists and civil rights activists. The chronically anti-immigration Henry Cabot Lodge very nearly passed a bill that would have given the federal government all the tools that the Voting Rights Act did, 75 years earlier and before Jim Crow had been consolidated. Eisenhower pursued the racist and cruel Operation Wetback but also signed two civil rights acts and protected the Little Rock students. Donald Trump is not a figure of this kind. He represents the very worst of us, an unmixed blot on our history. A racist in a multiracial society, a xenophobe in a nation of immigrants, a personalist in one of the world’s oldest democracies. Two hundred forty-nine years into the American experiment, we face a crisis of our own making. For our sake, for the sake of posterity and for the untold millions the administration will seek to terrorize and incarcerate, let us hope it is a crisis we can overcome.
Adam Gurri
Adam Gurri is a co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Liberal Currents. 
