Trump's Changing Deportation Strategy Reveals His Most Consistent Goal: Revenge And Owning The Libs
This goal of destroying blue state America may satisfy Trump and Maga's anger, but if successful, will result in an economic free fall
Until Trump, we’d never had a president whose most animating motivation was to destroy half the country and make its citizens miserable. White supremacists might say the same was true of Abraham Lincoln’s efforts at getting rid of slavery in the South, but such a view conveniently ignores the slaves in that region. Southern slave owners’ misery was other people’s freedom.
Donald Trump keeps signing Project 2025 sourced executive orders designed to deliberately attack blue states, blue cities and blue voters. Science research grants, whose work tends to be in blue cities, have been dramatically cut back. DEI initiatives, a mainstay in blue state-land, are being attacked. Climate and environmental justice initiatives in blue states are also being attacked. Sanctuary cities are being targeted for funding cuts. LGBTQ freedoms are being curtailed. The list goes on and on.
It’s not glib to say that Trump shows TACO tendencies on nearly everything except two aspects of his presidency: graft and owning the libs. I’ll ignore graft for the sake of focus and brevity. Owning the libs is the defining policy of Trump’s presidency. There’s a reason for that. Owning the libs (and POC) is why most of Trump’s voters enthusiastically voted for Trump. They ultimately care about little else.
Trump is not only delivering to his voters. Owning the libs is the only thing he himself ultimately cares about as well. Like any narcissist, he will go out of his way to hurt those he perceives who have slighted him or done him wrong. If half the country didn’t vote for him, that means half the country must pay a price.
The price may even be death. Trump VA hospital rules now say a doctor can refuse to care for Democrats and people based on marital status. If a veteran is wheeled into a hospital with a stroke, what happens? Can the doctor ask them or the family member with them, “Did he vote for Trump? Is he in a heterosexual marriage?” If they refuse to answer or say no, can the doctor walk away? Maybe so.
So it’s not surprising that Trump, in response to complaints from farmers and hotel owners who voted for him, announced that not only will he try to keep ICE from raiding farms and the service industry (he actually calls the undocumented immigrants in those sectors “very good”), but will focus on deportation in “blue cities.” He is also calling for “remigration,” which is white supremacist lingo for going after anyone who isn’t white and deporting them back to the land of their parents or grandparents.
It’s easy to see where this effort is headed. Red states will rarely see an ICE agent. But in blue cities in blue states, ICE will descend in droves, act likeThird Reich Gestapo or Stalin’s NKVD, take your pick, and terrorize brown people. The plan, if fully implemented, will create blue cities where federal agents rule at the city level. Blue cities just might be transformed into freedom-choked police states ruled by Team Trump.
Every president before Trump wanted to build things to make America better. Trump is unique in wanting to tear things down, in particular to tear down all of blue state America. This tearing down won’t make America better. Make America Great Again is an Orwellian slogan.
Blue states and blue cities are the engine of economic growth in America. They are the reason we are an innovation nation and the strongest economic power in the world. What Trump and Maga want, to make half of America miserable and worse in an act of revenge, is ultimately self destructive. If they fully succeed in this effort, America’s economy will go into free fall and they will kiss their comfortable lives in red states goodbye.
100% Agree with everything here. I’m of the opinion that Trump is the U.S.’s Salinas de Gortari. For example, as president today, Trump is rapidly reshaping federal governance to prioritize his own interests and those of his inner circle, sidelining the concerns of ordinary Americans. Trump’s administration has issued a flurry of executive actions—targeting law firms, freezing federal grants, dismantling agencies like USAID, and threatening mass firings of federal workers—often in ways that courts have ruled exceed his constitutional authority or violate established norms.
Like Salinas, whose presidency in Mexico became synonymous with elite enrichment through controversial privatizations and opaque policy shifts, Trump is leveraging his office for personal profit: he has monetized the White House through direct business ventures, such as launching a cryptocurrency tied to his name, a smartphone plan, and hosting exclusive investor events at his properties. Both leaders have been accused of undermining public institutions to benefit a privileged few, fostering a climate where self-dealing and conflict of interest are normalized, and where the rule of law is routinely challenged or ignored.
While Trump operates with the backdrop of a more robust system of checks and balances—albeit one he has aggressively tested and partially dismantled the guardrails of—the parallels to Salinas’s legacy of elite capture and public distrust remain—in my humble opinion—striking and deeply consequential.
I think he (and they) are so bent on revenge that the self-destructive aspect doesn’t factor in on an emotional level. But I also think that from the standpoint of the larger project (2025), if you want to Make America Medieval Again (for the first time, really), then you’re okay with breaking the eggs of the Liberal Enlightenment in order to create the omelette of the Christofascist technocracy. This requires much political and social deconstruction, and even death, but they have already signaled their willingness here.