What Are They Really Up To? MAGA’s Grand Strategy to Preserve the White Majority

Tying together the underlying agenda of MAGA and the President

The incredible barrage of norm-breaking actions being undertaken by this president has been overwhelming and confusing. It’s one outrage after another such that, pretty soon, our ability to be outraged is overwhelmed. We go numb. We stop fighting. It seems so useless anyway.

I don’t think it is useless to fight it, but most of our current fights are one thing at a time. We see the tree but lose the forest. We lose track of the big picture. In this article, I want to explore what is really going on with Trump world’s apparent xenophobia. What are they really up to?

Grand Strategy

To get at the big picture, we have to go back to Trump’s first term as president. At that time, Steve Bannon talked about the plan. He and his alt-right audience were, and still are, terrified by 2045—the year that whites will be outnumbered by non-whites in America. Bannon returns to this “problem” time and time again, and as he entered the White House on Trump’s coattails back then, he announced what they were up to. “We are undertaking a great demographic reshaping project” (italics mine). A demographic reshaping project is a euphemism for maintaining the white majority.

If you start with that understanding, nearly all of what is happening in Trump II can be understood. We can see it in five strategic initiatives: deportations, revoking birthright citizenship, disempowerment, promoting white births, and promoting white immigration.

Deportations

The biggest thing about deportations isn’t the deportation itself. Rather, it is the terrifying way that it is being conducted. Everyone knows that there is no way to deport the 11 million undocumented people in this country, including Trump. What they are doing instead is creating an essentially hostile environment for any non-white person so that they will go away by themselves. As Alon Confino documented in his book A World without Jews, the holocaust was not carried out against German Jews because by the time the camps became real death camps, almost all the German Jews had left Germany. Local, regional, and national laws passed in the 1930s had been set up to make it virtually impossible to operate in the country as a Jewish person. So gradually, over all those years, the Jews left. The death camps were filled with people sent by train from eastern Europe and anywhere else the Nazis had occupied.

This is what the deportations are about, and it is why they are arranging to send deportees to the worst possible places—the notorious jail in El Salvador, the tortured place of South Sudan, and other places that will horrify people. This is also why the administration has no interest in bringing back mistakenly or inappropriately deported people. It is why they don’t care that they have arrested Latino citizens, even if they later released them. It is why they don’t mind terrorizing communities with actions like arresting the high school student on his way to volleyball practice in Milford, MA. The administration actually wants everyone to think to themselves: “Shit, that could be me!” The hope is that they will leave the country themselves.

This terrorizing tactic achieves two key goals. First, it gets people out of the country, thereby reducing the population of non-white people directly. It also discourages non-white people from coming here—again, keeping a lid on the non-white population.

Second, and in many ways more critical to MAGA, is the prevention of non-white births within the country. If non-white people are not here, they cannot have babies here. Why is this important? Because those babies are automatically citizens and they are inexorably growing the proportion of the population that is not white. This is the same reason why Trump is trying to stop birth right citizenship. Citizens get all kinds of rights, especially the right to vote, and they are trying to stop the growing population of non-white citizens to preserve the white majority.

We can also understand the affront to international students the same way. Many tend to stay for graduate school, internships, or other opportunities before they either head home. Or, they apply to stay in the US and become citizens. The administration does not want these students because they tend to become or create citizens. Non-white citizens. Citizens who have babies and create more non-white citizens. They don’t want that.

If the government can disrupt the non-white communities while scaring the bejeebers out of them, non-white people will relocate on their own. That’s why they are making it as horrible as they possibly can. Hooded agents arresting people, destinations in El Salvador and South Sudan, surprise raids, arrests when reporting properly to ICE, and on and on. It is a campaign meant to terrorize certain groups of people so that the stress of never knowing what comes next will motivate their next moves. The administration does not care if many people are forced to move to keep their families together. In fact, they prefer it.

Ending Birth Right Citizenship

The administration’s effort to end birthright citizenship is primarily an effort to stop the population surge of the non-white demographic segment. Undocumented people are easy to deport or motivate to relocate. But their citizen children who were born here are not. They continue to add to the non-white population segment, bringing the end of the white majority that much closer. If they were able to end birthright citizenship, the administration can eliminate from citizenship the 7-8% of people born in this country to undocumented parents. They would shut off this demographic engine that produces around 300,000 new non-white citizens every year. That alone is six million people between now and 2045, and would single-handedly delay the march toward the non-white majority. No wonder they are taking a shot at this.

Disempowerment

For all the non-white people who are citizens, the administration needs to disempower and re-marginalize them to end their march toward prosperity and again, slow the birth rate and the voting participation rate. This disempowerment has moved along several fronts.

Federal government jobs, especially in Washington DC and the surrounding area, have been a great equalizer and enabler of the non-white middle class. Everything the administration has done to the government, from DOGE to re-classifications of federal jobs, to axing whole departments and disempowering departments that focus on righting the wrongs of discrimination, amount to nothing less than a frontal attack on the non-white middle class. The goal is to disempower it. Break it up. Cause chaos. And if possible, get some of them to look at leaving the country. Why? To preserve the white majority.

The administration’s hostility toward DEI is part of the same disempowerment effort. Not only have they dismantled it throughout the government, but the public bashing of the same in corporate America is, again, the use of government power to preserve white power and deny prosperity to black, brown, and other non-white people. Why deny prosperity? Because prosperity increases power—individual power, group power, class power, and race power. It keeps people here in America. It makes communities stable. Prosperous people are also far more likely to vote and exercise their political power. And prosperous people gladly regenerate through birth. Prosperous non-white people are more likely to become players in political power—a notion that sends terror into the hearts of people bent on maintaining the white majority.

A third leg of disempowerment is the re-enabling of bad justice and police brutality. Mass incarceration was a strategy started with the Reagan administration’s war on drugs, which was always a war on black and brown people. Police got away with a lot until the Geroge Floyd video emerged showing that what police said happened in his death was not what happened at all. Progress was continuing, it seemed, under the guidance of DOJ to ensure the rights of everyone were being honored. The Trump administration just reversed all of those efforts by filing to dismiss every lawsuit of its type. People disempowered by police unjustly will have no one to assist them on the federal level—and that is by design.

Here's the thing: People who have been killed by police can’t vote. People in prison can’t vote. People who are convicted felons can’t vote in many states. People disenfranchised by the system don’t vote because it looks useless to them. Such people lose all their power—political power, economic power, and even social power. Arresting the black community in this country has been a long-practiced strategy to ensure that a majority of black people do not and cannot rise to any kind of political force. Mass incarceration is a political strategy being executed here. It has one goal: Preserving the white majority.

Encouraging White Fertility

Leaving no stone unturned, the administration is also playing the flip side of this coin by doing everything it can to encourage an increased birth rate among white people. They have used the bully pulpit to celebrate so-called “trad wives,” attack so-called “childless cat ladies,” and generally tell people they should have more children. Ending the right to abortion and even to contraception will lead to more white pregnancies. Such efforts are blessed by the evangelical church community as being within the purview of moral behavior.

But the administration is also using government policy in novel ways. They want to expand tax credits for having babies to encourage more births. But the demographic impact is not lost on the likes of Steve Bannon. So long as whites are in the majority, and so long as whites tend to exist in the higher tax brackets, tax incentives will drive more births among white Americans. More white babies are another way to avoid the tipping point, as they see it, of the year 2045.

White Immigration

During Trump I, I didn’t catch it when Trump said that he wanted to see good people immigrate to the US, like people from Norway. Remember that? I hadn’t thought about it until recently. The entire picture is now more clear to me, and it gives a context to understand the administration’s outreach to white Afrikaners from South Africa. A lot of people saw this as resulting from the influence of Elon Musk, and no doubt Musk was influential, but it also fits perfectly into the same theme—bring in white people, let them have children, and make them into citizens. Non-white out, white in. It is a simple program with an extremely clear goal. For MAGA, it is especially appealing when those immigrants can be assumed to have values that align with conservative alt-right politics.

The Great Reshaping

What is unfolding is a grand scheme to reshape the demographics of the United States. It is not piecemeal and it is not accidental. They have undertaken a comprehensive strategy to ensure the continuity of the white majority in the US, and they will use any power they have, as well as many they do not have, to try to effect that outcome.

The truth is that I don’t know how far they will go. At this point, so much of what they are doing reflects the programs of the early Nazi regime, which happened long before the horrors of the death camps, and it leads one to wonder where all this is headed. If you asked them, I doubt they would know right now, just as I suspect few people in 1934 knew that Germany was headed for the fate that befell it. What is clear is that they are effectively creating a hostile environment for the people they do not want, and they are trying to welcome the people they do want. The desirable people they do want are defined by one characteristic at this point—the whiteness of their skin. The grand strategy has one goal: preserve the white majority. It is the one thing that ties all of these actions together.

Anthony Signorelli

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