Trumpworld’s Global War on Multiracial Democracy

The Trump administration’s embrace of overt white nationalism and its effort to lead a Western-world counterrevolution against the era of mass immigration is accelerating. Things are being said aloud that even a year ago would have been career suicide. The Trump administration’s messaging is now so extreme, so reliant on the Great Replacement language of the most far-right edge of Europe’s neofascist movements that it must be music to the ears of the fanatical fascist Norwegian Anders Breivik, sitting in his prison cell for slaughtering more than 70 mainly immigrant children in 2011. On a daily basis, top administration officials are essentially parroting Breivik’s manifesto.

Last week, I wrote about the Aliens.gov website and its effort to dehumanize the millions of immigrants who have made the United States their home in the 61 years since Congress liberalized immigration policy. This week, administration officials plus Elon Musk have been attempting to outdo even that fascist claptrap. In a series of extraordinary interventions in European politics, they have allied the administration squarely with the continent’s most xenophobic mob elements.

The transatlantic fusillade of racial venom began after a horrendous police intervention in the United Kingdom and the trial that followed.

Last December, a Sikh man named Vickrum Digwa stabbed Henry Nowak, an 18-year-old white man in the town of Southampton. When the police arrived, Digwa falsely claimed he had been defending himself from a racist attack. The police, operating to an inflexibly rigid set of protocols regarding how to respond to a suspected racial attack, promptly handcuffed the mortally wounded Nowak, who died, still handcuffed, lying on the sidewalk and gasping that he couldn’t breathe.

By any measure, Nowak’s death was a tragedy, and by any measure, the police response was appalling. But in this era of growing white nationalism, it triggered a backlash against what Musk is labeling “two-tier policing,” by which he means a set of protocols that allegedly treat white suspects more harshly than non-white suspects. It is, of course, nonsense—the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency has documented continent-wide patterns of discriminatory, often violent, policing against ethnic minorities. But after Nowak’s killing, a slew of British and US fascists and far-right party leaders have latched onto it to further their culture wars. In the UK Parliament, Trump’s ally the Reform Party leader Nigel Farage, repeatedly claimed that two-tier policing was in play.

On June 1, a judge sentenced Digwa to life in prison for the murder and slammed the police response to Nowak’s stabbing. In the wake of this, with attention once more focused on allegedly discriminatory policing against whites and as English nationalists rioted in Southampton, the Trump administration took its bigotry one extraordinary step further, repeatedly linking Nowak’s death to Europe’s migration policies. On X, Vice President JD Vance wrote, “Henry Nowak died the same way a civilization dies: abandoned, handcuffed by authorities who neither trusted nor cared for him, and accused of hate crimes he did not commit. His murder is as tragic as it is enraging. He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it.” Hitler couldn’t have said it better himself.

That is a million miles removed from the inane “thoughts and prayers” that Republicans routinely utter after a white man goes on a mass killing spree in the United States and leaves dozens of families devastated. Imagine if Vance were to blame 200 years of Irish or German migration into the United States after a white man with an Irish or German-sounding name picked up his semiautomatic rifle and killed a whole bunch of kids. Imagine if Trump or Vance had blamed all Anglo Saxons for Stephen Paddock’s 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people and injured 500 others. The outrage from all political corners at smearing millions of people simply because the killer had a last name with English Anglo Saxon roots would have been instantaneous. In the debased Trumpian environment, however, when white men kill it is because of individual pathology, but when non-whites and immigrants kill, the entire world of immigrants and their allies are to blame.

Just as striking as Vance’s outburst was the GOP response to it. Elected Republicans settled into a familiar position: duck and cover. Seemingly hiding under their congressional desks, GOP lawmakers chose to be silent about Vance’s preposterous social-media post. And, of course, silence in the face of bigotry only generates more bigotry.

The vice president’s intervention was, it turned out, merely the spear tip of a massive Trump administration pressure campaign on Western European governments—one seemingly intended, at least in part, to shift attention away from Trump and the GOP’s mounting domestic political troubles. After all, with efforts to end the Iran war not going well, the Epstein files continuing to loom over US politics, and Trump creating one electoral hostage to fortune after the next—his latest senescent outburst, in response to numbers showing inflation now topping 4 percent, was to announce, “You know what I really love? I love the inflation”—why not deflect from domestic political woes by going full race-war on the Western world?

The State Department publicly called for an end to two-tier policing, and the White House put out a statement saying the perceived policing policy represented “glaring symptoms of civilizational decline.”

Days later, neanderthal “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth went to an 82nd-anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings and proceeded to deliver a blood-and-soil harangue against European democracies.

“Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies,” Trump’s fascist-amplifier warned. “Boats and men” were coming in, and Europe was, he noted, asleep at the wheel. “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?” Again, Hitler could not have said it better himself.

When, shortly afterward, bloody rioting broke out in Belfast, Northern Ireland, against Somali and Sudanese immigrants and asylum seekers, after a Sudanese asylum seeker was accused in a near-fatal stabbing earlier in the week, once again team Trump couldn’t resist fanning the flames.

As masked mobs, whipped up by right-wing tabloid news coverage of the horrific crime, set fire to homes lived in by immigrants, Musk repeatedly posted on X that Belfast residents should take to the streets in protest—and shared posts by fascist agitator Tommy Robinson telling the mob where to congregate; Musk also blamed mass migration for the stabbing.

Trumpworld is now occupying a place in the political landscape at least as noxious as that claimed by George Wallace and his segregationist mobs in 1968. As its popularity plummets, the administration is performing a classic, and predictable, authoritarian pivot. It has shucked off all pretense of caring about human rights and of operating within a multiracial, multicultural democratic context; in other words, it has shucked off a fundamental part of post–World War II American identity. What we are getting now is a diet of raw blood-and-soil nationalism.

Nine years ago, Trump said there were “some very fine people, on both sides” of the Charlottesville, Virginia, battle between neo-Nazis—chanting “Jews will not replace us,” waving Confederate flags, and wearing a slew of racist, white nationalist paraphernalia—and anti-racist protesters. In 2026, Number 47 isn’t even bothering with the charade. It is clear beyond any shadow of a doubt where his allegiances lie. For Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Musk, the “very fine people” are the neo-Nazis both stateside and in Europe.

The boys from Brazil, the Nazi clones looking to resurrect the dreams of a racially pure empire in the 1978 movie of that name, are alive and well. They are, to paraphrase Aliens.gov, walking among us and doing politics among us. They occupy the White House, the Pentagon, and Foggy Bottom, and they are seeking to undermine the values that made us great.