President Donald Trump is privately panicking that longtime far-right adviser Stephen Miller is steering his presidency into the ditch, per recent reports — but doesn't actually seem to be doing anything to stop that, Greg Sargent wrote for The New Republic on Tuesday.
This comes amid reporting from the Wall Street Journal that Trump wants to sideline Miller, and put a softer messaging spin on his mass deportation agenda, making it clearer to the public he wants to target hardened criminals and not simply snatch random people up off the street.
The problem, wrote Sargent, is that Miller hasn't really been leashed in any meaningful way — and is coming up with even more ways to undermine civil rights.
"To be clear, this report deserves serious skepticism," wrote Sargent. "It very much bears watching whether ICE will actually end up deprioritizing the removal of noncriminal immigrants. Trump mostly wants the appearance of a pivot: According to the Journal, he wants a focus on 'criminals' in GOP 'messaging.' But recalibrating the 'messaging' won’t address the public’s broad rejection of Trumpism’s deeper anti-immigrant project. And all signs are that this project is fully forging ahead."
For instance, this comes amid reports that Miller is pressuring GOP state legislators to kick the citizen children of unauthorized immigrants out of public schools — which would directly contradict a 1982 Supreme Court ruling, and set up a massive fight that, if Republicans won, would create a huge lower class of citizens with no right to an education.
"Trump and Miller are aiming at something very profound, if maliciously so," wrote Sargent. "As legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar writes, the 'big idea' animating the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, its 'moral north star,' is that birthright citizenship enshrines a guarantee that all persons are born free and equal — their status is not dictated by blood. The goal of undoing this, Amar notes, is to make the constitutional order more 'hereditary' and 'caste-like.'"
In other words, they want a country in which "heritage, not adherence to creedal ideals, makes one American."
"Trump can dress this up with spin about targeting 'criminals' all he likes. But until all the ethnonationalist, civilizational-emergency-mongering nonsense is exorcised, the deeper problem will fester," Sargent concluded. "Trump believes all those ideas himself, but the depth of his commitment to them has never been all that clear. One doubts he’ll be so inclined, but should he ever want to end this madness, only one move on his part — a big personnel move — can truly put an end to it."