The megabill President Donald Trump just signed is remarkably unpopular. Even Fox News admits that according to polls, “Americans are far from thrilled with the measure.” On Monday, Vice President JD Vance took to social media to put some steel in GOP spines. “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” he wrote. The bill “fixes this problem….Everything else — the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy — is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
Vance has a point, sort of: The legislation will enormously increase the resources the government will devote to rounding up and incarcerating immigrants, providing tens of billions of dollars for nothing less than a redefinition of American identity. Those provisions are at least as important as the tax giveaways to the wealthy or the brutal cuts to Medicaid, which will take health insurance from as many as 16 million people. Vance has done as much as anyone in the administration to create the philosophical justification for this rejection of not just centuries of history, but America’s very ideals.
The vice president offered a preview of this approach during the 2024 campaign.
This legislation will pour over $150 billion into border and immigration enforcement. It will triple the budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It will allot tens of billions of dollars for detention facilities, and tens of billions more to complete Trump’s border wall. If you think those masked-up ICE agents rolling into Home Depot parking lots are a bunch of unprofessional goons, just wait until the agency hires thousands of new personnel. And if they aren’t in your community now, they may be soon.
Meanwhile, Justice Department leadership has directed its attorneys to focus on “denaturalization,” taking away citizenship from naturalized citizens when they are convicted of crimes (there are around 24 million naturalized citizens). Though the DOJ is starting this effort with convicted criminals, this administration’s ambitions are always larger; when asked if the president wants New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani denaturalized and deported because of a song he sang when he was younger, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “It’s something that should be investigated.”
The president, after threatening to arrest Mamdani, said, “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally” (false) and “we’re going to look at everything.”
An immigration, incarceration and deportation apparatus many times its current size, executed by an administration eager to expel as many people as possible, is the recipe for a police state — and it’s just what Vance was hoping for.
The vice president offered a preview of this approach during the 2024 campaign. He amplified the despicable lies about Haitian immigrants in his home state of Ohio, claims he all but admitted were false, but were politically useful. He also said that though he knew those Haitians were in the U.S. legally — they had temporary protected status (TPS) — he would still refer to them as “illegal aliens” anyway. The Trump administration is now trying to revoke TPS for all Haitian immigrants, subjecting them to deportation.
In Vance’s convention speech and other appearances, he tried to clothe his anti-immigrant argument in terms less vulgar — but just as dangerous. In accepting the GOP nomination for vice president, he rejected a central foundation of the American ethos: that our identity is not a function of race or religion or lineage; instead, anyone can become a part of if they believe in and commit themselves to our founding ideals. This is what is supposed to have made America different from the moment of its founding.
Anyone with a grasp of history can hear the echoes of odious nationalisms from the past. But Vance disagrees. “America is not just an idea,” he told the convention. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future.” To emphasize the point that if you aren’t part of that “shared history” then you can’t be truly American, Vance described the cemetery where five generations of his family are buried. “Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland,” he said. It was an assertion he had made before, and anyone with a grasp of history can hear the echoes of odious nationalisms from the past. It may have been expressed most vividly in the “blood and soil” slogan used by the Nazis (and American neo-Nazis today) insisting that only those with the right lineage and ties to the land (especially rural land) were true citizens of the nation. You can see it expressed in Trump’s attempt to undo the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment says that if you’re born here, you’re an American. Nope, say Trump and Vance — we’ll decide if we think you’re American enough, based on who your parents are, whether we like your political beliefs, which god you pray to, and so forth. Membership in this national community is provisional and can be revoked. But Vance is wrong. Part of the American creed is that we don’t care where anyone’s ancestors are buried. Vance’s debased version of patriotism says that we’re just a tribe like any other: insular, fearful and hateful, believing in nothing more morally ambitious. It’s small and ugly — and, dare I say, un-American.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
