It’s an attempt to rile up the MAGA base over reforms to the immigration system 60 years ago.
Tom Homan, White House “border czar,” during a television interview in Washington, DC, on June 4, 2026.
(Samuel Corum / Sipa / Bloomberg)
The White House recently posted an “Aliens” video, complete with spooky X Files–styled music and an ominous voiceover. The green-lettered narration, designed like the text in a bad sci-fi prologue, explained how for 60 years “they” have walked among “us,” lived among us, sent their children to our schools, but how they aren’t really like us and they don’t belong here.
The cheesy video, which directs viewers to a new Aliens.gov website, is, of course, another effort to dehumanize immigrants. What’s most striking about this Julius Streicher–like exercise, apart from the sheer racial and nationalist animus, is the timeline the video and site focuses on: 60 years.
According to the White House, “they” have been corroding America for the last six decades. That timeline wasn’t chosen arbitrarily, and it signals exactly what is going on here. This has nothing to do with undocumented immigrants and everything to do with the millions of non-white immigrants who entered the country, legally, since the 1965 reforms to the immigration system that ended the nativist quota system put in place in the 1920s and allowed for family unification to be a prime goal of the American immigration system. The conflation here is stunning: It is allegedly about “illegals,” but is in fact designed to rile up viewers against all the different immigrant groups who have made the United States their home since Congress liberalized the immigration system 60 years ago.
This bilious production is being brought to Americans’ screens by members of the US government. Those officials have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution and to serve and protect all Americans, not just those with their preferred skin color and political disposition. The website was funded, presumably, by US taxpayers— of all colors, all religions, all cultures. Yet what it is saying, pretty much explicitly, is that America should be understood as a white man’s country, a white man’s project, a white man’s playground. It is a White House endorsement of the Great Replacement theory, the nebulous notion that liberals in Western countries have engaged in a meta-conspiracy over the generations to marginalize white men and Christian culture.
That pretty much gels with “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth’s caricature-like understanding of the country. This most hypocritical of “Christians,” this man who dares to argue that he is implementing God’s vision by waging war on such “woke” ideas as respect for human rights and adherence to the Geneva Conventions, has been caught, for the second time this year, denying military promotions to a slew of women and African Americans, for no reason other than that they are women or African Americans. He is busily undoing eight decades of efforts to integrate the US military leadership, and is attempting to make sure that Black men cannot give orders to white enlistees, and that women, of any color, cannot be in positions of power over men. In Hegseth’s understanding, to exercise power legitimately one must have both pale skin and testicles.
It gels, too, with ICE recruitment videos, which are now so overtly racist that, according to an Intercept investigation, some local police forces apparently fear they could incite white supremacist violence against non-whites and immigrants.
And it gels with current DOJ investigations into a slew of top-tier universities, some in the Ivy Leagues, others top state universities, basically for their enrollment of Black and brown students. It’s in line, too, with EEOC explicit requests, in recent months, for white men to come forward with claims that they were discriminated against in the workplace because they were white men.
This is the most clearly white supremacist political project in the United States since the end of Jim Crow in the Deep South. It has the stamp of approval of the Supreme Court, which just this week, in the wake of its destruction of the Voting Rights Act, upheld Alabama’s new voting maps that were created with the specific intent of disappearing the state’s one majority-Black congressional district. And it has the enthusiastic backing of the president and his top henchmen.
Increasingly, Trump’s presidency is boiling down to a handful of revenge efforts: white revenge against all of these “alien” types; personal revenge against perceived political enemies (look no further than his primary-election-season destruction of Congress members Thomas Massie, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn); and institutional revenge against political systems and corners of the bureaucracy that he deems to be insufficiently loyal to his authoritarian vision.
Trump regards the entire federal workforce as his subordinates. He views Congress as existing only to rubber-stamp his every whim; hence his reaction when the House of Representatives finally voted, on Wednesday, to rein in his war-making powers on Iran. Trump responded by calling it “unpatriotic.” Of course, it wasn’t. In fact, it may have been the only patriotic vote this feckless Congress has taken during Trump 2.0. What Trump really meant was something like, “I am the state. You oppose me. Therefore you are opposing the functioning of the state.” One can almost see him in his tricorn hat, his face beet red with rage, a power-crazed Napoleon, post-Austerlitz, demanding of his parliament ever-more unfettered powers.
Or take the bizarre nomination of Bill Pulte to be director of National Intelligence. Pulte has zero qualifications for the job, as even this Congress seems to realize. But he does have one almighty upside in Number 47’s eyes: his willingness to crawl through the sewers to make Trump happy. To wit, he unscrupulously abused his position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency to conjure up a series of deeply flawed allegations of mortgage fraud against several high-profile Trump enemies, including Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve, Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. And in Trump’s increasingly shriveled brain, that willingness to be a hatchet man for the boss, to degrade himself to the point of absurdity to fulfill Trump’s every desire, fully qualifies Pulte for one of the most sensitive jobs in the federal government.
Trump is going to turn 80 next week. He will celebrate his birthday by watching grown men, glistening with sweat, beat each other to a pulp in a series of cage fights on the White House lawn. This exercise in mindless brutality, this fetishization of cruelty and of inflicted pain, is a perfect metaphor for Trump 2.0. It is coarse; it is crude; it is culturally debased. It is, in short, the quintessential Trump distillate.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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