Elon Musk's “illegal” past doesn't sound like hypocrisy to MAGA – Trump's hate rally in NYC shows why


Last week, the Washington Post reported that Tesla CEO and Donald Trump super-fan Elon Musk had called it “illegal” to use the term preferred by MAGA. That is to say, he did what most undocumented immigrants in America do. Having traveled here legally, he overstayed his visa and then worked without legal authorization to do so. Investors were so worried that the South African native would be deported that they even stipulated that he would obtain legal status in his contracts, creating a paper trail to prove his “illegal” status. Can go. As for why readers should care, Post journalists offered a “hypocrisy” frame, saying, “In recent months Musk has escalated the Republican presidential nominee's claims about 'open borders' and undocumented immigrants. Destroying America.”

When MAGA say “illegal”, they mean that no one should be allowed to call themselves “American” according to them.

The MAGA world shrugged, but not because they're particularly talented at managing cognitive dissonance. No, they don't see this story as evidence of hypocrisy. I generally hate arguments over semantics, but this one matters. The Post's reporters incorrectly assume that when Musk, Trump and their allies are talking about “illegals,” they mean immigrants who don't have the proper documentation to live and work in the U.S., but If you pay attention to how the term is used in context, it's clear that Musk and company use the category “illegal” to refer to all non-white immigrants, and, increasingly, any native-born Americans. For citizens whose skin color or ethnic heritage MAGA disapproves of. For MAGA, an undocumented white immigrant is OK. But a legal immigrant with dark skin – or even a native-born citizen – is an “illegal.”

A scan of Musk's frequent tweets on this front shows this. Musk's recent midnight tweet screamed about the “horror of the illegal voter importation program under Biden-Harris.” President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are not “importing” anyone. Other tweets show Musk pointing to immigrants, the majority of whom are not white, who are entering under international asylum laws, meaning they have a legal right to be here. This is not “importing” immigrants, but rather a government program that already allows people who wish to relocate to do so legally. By definition, it is legal.


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Nor is Musk alone. Most of the time, when MAGA leaders say “illegals” or “illegal immigrants,” they are insulting legal immigrants. When Trump and his running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, spread the lie that Haitian immigrants steal and eat people's pets, they weren't just lying about their own behavior. He described them as “illegals,” even though these people are part of a government program that allows them to live and work in the U.S. Vance was corrected during the vice presidential debate by moderator Margaret Brennan, who told the audience. that the Haitians in question have legal status, Vance complained, saying, “You guys weren't going to check the facts” so obnoxiously that he cut off his microphone.

But if there was any doubt that the “immigration” issue is about MAGA racism and not immigration, speakers at the Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Sunday night erased it. The comment that received the most press attention was from “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe, who began a series of racist jokes. In particular, he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”, which no one understood as a comment about the natural beauty of the famous vacation spot.

The comment received the most media attention because it came early in the evening, was criticized by influential Puerto Ricans such as Bad Bunny, and – most importantly for horse racing-focused media – because Puerto Ricans living in the 50 states have the right to To vote in the presidential election. But what may be more important is that, by going after a group of native-born citizens, Hinchcliffe upped the MAGA game. This is not and never was about “immigration”, legal or otherwise. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, but natural-born citizens, whose legal status is the same as any random white person in a diner in Iowa.

The Trump campaign issued a sharp comment saying “the joke does not reflect the views of President Trump”, but it was quickly verified that the joke was loaded into the teleprompter. The campaign knew well what Hinchcliffe was going to say and only scrambled when reminded of how many Puerto Ricans vote in swing states. But it's self-evident that the campaign spokesperson lied because he didn't disavow any of the many other racist jokes told by Hinchcliffe, such as a tired joke about black people and watermelons and Latinos having babies. A complaint about. The “humor” at the 2024 MAGA rally derives from cartoons in 50s KKK pamphlets.

Nor was Hinchcliffe alone. The entire rally was based on rhetoric aimed directly at denying the legitimacy of Native Americans, often in blatantly racist terms. Right-wing “influencer” Grant Cardone accused Harris of being a “broker operator” and said of Democratic voters, “We need to slaughter these people.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Harris, who was born an American citizen in California, as a “Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor.” That “low IQ” claim is a favorite, vague dog whistle that Trump often applies to black people because of his lifelong obsession with the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. Carlson's “joke” about Harris, whom he knows well because her father is Jamaican and mother is Indian, is a trollish way of saying that all non-white people are the same – and among them No one is a real American. By the time Trump speechwriter Stephen Miller took the stage to declare, “America is by Americans and for Americans only,” there was no doubt that in the MAGA world “American” only meant “white people.”

Trump's speech also made clear that the growing circle of people he denies are Americans now includes white people who oppose him, or sometimes even dare to speak the truth about him Are. His now catchphrase of “the enemy within” had already grown to encompass Democratic elected officials and journalists. On Sunday, he declared that it involves an “amorphous group of people” for whom Biden and Harris are merely “vessels.” This is a catastrophic reconstruction of the system where people vote for leaders who represent their interests, i.e. democracy. While some pundits are pondering whether calling Trump a fascist is an “insult” to voters, the GOP's fascist leader has declared the majority of American voters — more than 81 million people — non-Americans an “enemy from within.” Gave.

The MAGA rhetoric has heated up, but the idea that the only “real” Americans are those who look, act, and vote like them has been ingrained in Trumpism even before he ran for the Republican nomination for the first time. Had gone. Trump first began making national political news by endorsing the “birther” conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama. At the time, the press took this conspiracy theory literally, as if it represented genuine confusion among Republicans over whether Obama was a natural-born citizen. It is now clear that, like most right-wing conspiracy theories, it is more symbolic, that someone like Obama – black, liberal, cosmopolitan – cannot be a “real” American. The Big Lie, based on the idea that voters in racially diverse cities commit “fraud,” is much the same. Republicans know that residents of Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta are legal voters, but they think they shouldn't.

And so it is associated with the word “illegal”. It is unwise for the press to take this as a literal description of an immigrant who is living and working without proper documentation. Such a term would apply to Musk in the past, but not to Haitian immigrants, whom Vance and Trump have vilified. However, when MAGA say “illegal”, they mean that no person should be allowed to call themselves “American” according to them. As with “enemies within,” it is clear that this is a broad range of non-white immigrants, native-born people of color, and, increasingly, white liberals. It is like the Nazi term “undesirability” in the breadth of its scope. That's why it's no coincidence that Sunday's rally looked exactly like a 1939 Nazi rally at the same location.

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