Making The Optics Of Terror Look Better
Greg Sargent on BlueSky has a killer thread about how public reaction to the Trump/Miller campaign of terror is unnerving some of their advisors that is a Must Read…
Trump is privately worried about the “optics” of ICE raids and his advisers are looking for ways to soften them, Axios reports. I’m calling bullshit: The terror and violence cannot be hived off from the broader policy agenda. They are 100% intrinsic to it.
There is no recalibrated or sanitized way to conduct the war that Trump and Stephen Miller are waging on American cities right now. That’s because it’s a campaign of deliberate terror.
The policy *is* the terror, and the terror *is* the policy.
The dream of sanitized, popular mass deportations rests on the idea that they can be carried out without mass disruptions. But that is not doable. The Trump-Miller agenda by definition requires prioritizing high removals over all else to achieve ethnic cleansing:
Terror is essential to Miller’s project. It’s designed to dissuade us from showing solidarity with the immigrants getting removed. Stand in the way of ethnic cleansing and you risk violence yourself.
Sargent’s BlueSky thread includes screen captures of his article in The New Republic. It’s well worth reading both!
