When immigration is your core issue…

Notes from Day 3 at the RNC

Here’s a button for sale outside the RNC convention hall in Milwaukee, reading: “I was once willing to give my life for what this country stood for; now I’d give my life to protect my family from what this country has become.” Now, what someone puts on a button for sale at a party convention doesn’t necessarily tell you about what’s in the party’s platform or what kind of rhetoric is going on inside the halls. These buttons don’t even require approval from the RNC. But the messaging is not far off in this case.

Here’s what’s going on inside the halls. “Mass deportation now!” convention placards printed out by the RNC and handed out to delegates to show during prime time coverage. As I noted here, the party’s 2016 platform mentioned immigration, but mostly in a mixed way, and often praising the contributions of those who moved to the U.S. legally. By contrast, the party’s brief 2024 platform sets strict border control and immigrant removal — “the largest deportation in American history” — as its top priorities.

Related to this was vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance’s acceptance speech last night. Most of the speech was fine and perfectly anodyne: introducing himself and his family, telling his life story, professing admiration for Donald Trump, etc. But then it took a pretty jarring nationalistic turn when he started talking about the “idea” of America.

This is a concept that has a long history in the U.S. President Biden said in his 2021 address to Congress, “America is an idea — unique in the world. We are all created equal. It’s who we are. We cannot walk away from that principle.” This isn’t a particularly partisan concept. Ronald Reagan once said, “America is less a place than an idea.” Hell, here’s what Bono had to say:

America is an idea. Ireland is a great country, but it’s not an idea. Great Britain is a great country, but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world, as one of the greatest ideas in human history.

J.D. Vance took a very different approach:

But America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is in short, a nation. Now it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms….

Now in [my family’s burial plot in Kentucky], there are people who were born around the time of the Civil War. And if, as I hope, my wife and I are eventually laid to rest there and our kids follow us, there will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in Eastern Kentucky. Seven generations of people who have fought for this country, who've built this country, who have made things in this country, and who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.

Now that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles, even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland.

People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their homes. And if this movement of hours is going to succeed, and if this country is going to thrive, our leaders have to remember that America is a nation and its citizens deserve leaders who put its interests first.

That is a significant departure from where the GOP was just a few years ago and what had been something of a national consensus about just what the country is. Vance’s message is quite clearly that some people simply do not belong and are not part of America.

Perhaps under-emphasized in coverage of this week’s convention is just how radical Trump’s plan to deport, in his own words, 15-20 million people (over 5% of the American population). It would, of course, be a wildly violent act, involving an exertion of police and military force not seen since the Civil War. It would be profoundly racialized, with a largely white governing party evicting an overwhelmingly nonwhite population. And it would also be massively disruptive, with cities and communities and neighborhoods and families actively resisting and thwarting deportation efforts and being met by government force. The level of strife being advocated here is really hard to imagine and nothing like what any living American has seen on a nationwide basis.

Donald Trump is mostly conservative in the traditional sense, in that he is happy to support tax cuts and reductions in business and environmental regulation, but that’s never been where his passion lies. His most consistent and energetic stances have been in enacting a populist vision for the nation that massively restricts immigration, especially across the southern border, and indeed seeks to turn things back to a time before many immigrants arrived. His party is now very much on board with this mission, to the point where it is not even controversial.