Make America Fascist Again (MAFA!)
Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a campaign rally at the Prescott Valley Event Center in Prescott Valley, Arizona on October 4, 2016,Photo by Gage Skidmore / flickr
In the next year, anything could happen. Donald Trump, could go down, he could be convicted of one or more felonies. He could lose the GOP nomination. Or, a return would change Make America Great Again (MAGA!) to Make America Fascist Again (MAFA!)
On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”
Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.
Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.
Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.
The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.
In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
Trump Threatens
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as the New York Times reported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.
Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the Global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.
Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps” — think: prisons — that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told the New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
And rest assured about one thing: the next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons.
Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House — a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges — success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me — they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.