Denaturalization

 In his memoir about life in France on the threshold of World War II, Scum of the Earth, Arthur Koestler charts out the full ignominious course of events by which once-proudly democratic France surrendered to Hitler and gradually converted itself into an authoritarian, collaborationist state. 

First, Koestler recounts, the French government locked up all the anti-Hitler refugees from Germany and Eastern Europe (including Koestler himself). This perverse action was accompanied by a wave of unthinking xenophobia directed against any outsider, wholly unable (or unwilling) to distinguish friend from foe.

Obviously, the Trump administration has already replicated this pathway. They have locked up or summarily expelled refugees from just about every authoritarian regime on Earth that our government once claimed to oppose: Cuba, Russia, Afghanistan, the PRC, Iran, Nicaragua, Venezuela, the list goes on. 

Koestler ticks through the series of other policy changes that followed, as the collaborationist Vichy regime consolidated power. One entry in his diary from the era reads: "New decree provides that every civil servant is liable to be sacked without pension, during a period of purge from now through October 31st." Echoes here of "DOGE." 

But the incident from Koestler's account that stands out most in my memory this week comes from an entry in his diary dated July 25, 1939: "New decree creates special commission to revise all naturalizations granted to aliens since 1927; anyone naturalized since that date can be deprived of French citizenship, also his wife and children." 

I couldn't help but think back to that passage this week, now that the Trump administration has raided the office of a sitting member of Congress—reportedly for the purpose of building a case to revoke her citizenship (based on years-old claims about an alleged misstatement on her father's immigration paperwork). 

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week: "The Trump administration’s investigation into Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) is aimed at building a case to strip her of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her, according to U.S. officials and other people familiar with the probe."

Trump has obviously long showed an interest in restricting or eliminating the citizenship of groups and individuals he disfavors. He has announced sweeping denaturalization campaigns before, and he obviously devoted much of his second term to trying to end birthright citizenship by executive fiat (despite the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment). 

But Trump's apparent effort to strip a prominent member of the political opposition in Congress of citizenship arguably sets an even worse authoritarian precedent—"another leap toward the abyss," in Michelle Goldberg's phrase. 

Trump has already repeatedly and publicly ordered his own federal prosecutors to target domestic political opponents. It is a logical next step in the authoritarian retrogression that he would eventually bend his efforts to trying to deny them political rights entirely and banish them from the country. 

It should not be overlooked that Trump's DOJ is doing this just weeks away from a midterm election, in which Rep. Omar is running to keep her seat. 

As revealed in the example of that "special commission" Koestler describes from the Vichy era, denaturalization of politically and racially disfavored out-groups is one of the well-worn steps on the road toward authoritarian despotism—and toward a particularly cowardly, craven despotism at that. 

The Vichy regime lacked the patriotism to defend France from an actual invader; they sought to make up for it with a cruel, exaggerated ethno-nationalism directed against defenseless non–French nationals living on their soil—people who actually believed in France's republican mission and who would have been willing to help defend her from the Nazis had they been given a chance. 

Trump has been compared to Hitler often enough by this point on the Left. I have thought—since reading Koestler's book—that his administration is really more like the Vichy government. That is to say, it is not only fascist and despotic, but fundamentally spineless and unpatriotic too. 

Trump's attitude to the actual authoritarians who menace our values around the world, after all, is one of craven submission. Viz. the way he has rolled over to Putin once again this week in his policy toward Ukraine. Viz. the way he tried to buddy up to Xi Jinping at their latest summit. Viz. the way he relentlessly courts Gulf State autocrats in his corrupt self-dealing.

He combines this total lack of patriotism or commitment to American ideals with a vicious ethno-nationalism directed against racial and ethnic out-groups domestically, who actually placed their trust in the American experiment: people like Somali refugees who believed our country's promises about being a haven from oppression. 

His faithless betrayal of these hopes puts him on the same side as history's other quislings and collaborationists—people who sold out their country and their allies for thirty pieces of silver—and posteriority will be no kinder to his memory than it is to theirs. 

And seen in the light of that eternity and futurity, I know already that Trump has failed and cannot but fail. To quote Hugh MacDiarmid's verdict on the fascists of the 1930s: "In the perspectives that before me open / I know the evil will be undone and vengeance wrought / With a completeness beyond human thought."