The Brooklyn Rail

There are now 304 million migrants in the world. This represents 3.7% of the total population of the world, comprising 8.2 billion people. A little over half of these migrants have gone to Europe and North America, looking for a better life. The number of people that have been forcibly displaced stands at 123 million, and that number has tripled since 2000. Of those 123 million refugees and asylum seekers, 40% are children.¹ As the richest country in the world, what is the responsibility of the US to those children and adults forced to leave their homelands by oppressive regimes? Again, these are not “criminals” and “terrorists” as Trump and Stephen Miller claim, but people looking for a better life for themselves and for their families.

The mass deportations carried out by ICE are the actions of a deranged gang of xenophobes who are blaming immigrants for all the ills of modern American society. This is what tyrants have always done, on the way to authoritarianism for all. In many forms of government (monarchy or dictatorship, for instance), it is not necessary for people to get involved. But in a democracy, citizens must get involved.

Not Far from the Tree

In 1950, Woody Guthrie lived in the Beach Haven housing complex in Gravesend, Brooklyn, that was run by Donald Trump’s father, Fred Christ Trump. Guthrie was incensed by the elder Trump’s racist housing practices and wrote a song about them:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project.

After Donald Trump became the president of his father’s real estate business in 1971, they were sued by the US Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division for racial discrimination.

While living in Fred Trump’s building, Woody Guthrie wrote a poem called “Deportee,” honoring the Mexican migrants who died in a 1948 plane crash in Los Gatos Canyon in California while being deported back to Mexico. After Guthrie recorded himself singing it on a reel-to-reel tape, the song disappeared for a decade until a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman set it to music and Pete Seeger started singing it, and it was eventually performed  by Judy Collins, Odetta, Joni Mitchell, the Byrds, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Arlo Guthrie, Billy Bragg, and Bruce Springsteen.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees.”

A few years before Fred Trump became Woody Guthrie’s landlord, in 1944, Guthrie had written and sang “All You Fascists Bound to Lose”:

I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose.

Race hatred cannot stop us
This one thing we know
Your poll tax and Jim Crow
And greed has got to go
You’re bound to lose,
You fascists are bound to lose.

A New Moral Language

On November 21, 2025, Rachel Maddow sat down with Timothy Snyder in the Harris Theater in Chicago to talk about the way that city has responded to Donald Trump’s takeover by ICE (and a recording of the event was later broadcast on MS-Now on December 12). Appearing with Maddow and Snyder onstage were Pastor Julie Contreras, the founder of United Giving Hope, and Baltazar Enriquez, the President of the Little Village Community Council, both of whom were instrumental in Chicago’s vigorous response to ICE invading their city. Professor Snyder said authoritarian regimes almost always move against immigrants in order to insert a lawless order and build a national surveillance and paramilitary force that is then used against the resistance at large. This is what ICE is intended to become.

Snyder spoke about the importance of resisting “in the physical world,” and he called on lawyers and others to fight the MAGA forces legally, on the offensive, not just defensively. He also repeated his analysis that he now does not see Trump and MAGA succeeding in their attempt to install “coast-to-coast authoritarianism” in the US, but that they are breaking the government and civil society in the process of taking it over, and the result may be that the country comes apart. He said grifters like Trump are both cynical and naïve, and they live inside of a “grift bubble.” And he said we are going to need a new “moral language” to talk about what is being broken, and what it will take to put it back together, not just as it was, but better, together.

The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites uses the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.

It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.

—Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, November 30, 2025

Because of Trump’s actions in support of Putin and other authoritarian leaders, the US is on the way to losing its moral standing in the world. Other US presidents have pursued unjust and injurious policies that have damaged the reputation of the US before, but Trump is rapidly making it a pariah state.

When Rob and Michele Reiner were murdered in their home on December 14, Trump immediately tweeted out that Rob Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” This is the current President of the United States.