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anymore? In some of his earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008,
Trump talked with bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European
immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would
be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His
obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-
European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these people? Why were they
here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country
reflecting dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a
multitude of countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state
in the United States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily
reality of the American workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an
alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also
in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was
to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet
of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the
media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the
compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws,
rules, and customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration.
It was a double liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been
quite aggressive in deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.
“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”
7 OK Ok
Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process.
Rather than seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping
liberal fig leaves in place—he sought the most.
Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of
government as avoiding conflict.
This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected
agencies and departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John
Kelly, then the director of Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray
caused by the immigration EO—wanted nothing more than a moment to get their footing
before they might even consider dramatic and contentious new policies. Old appointees—
Obama appointees who still occupied most executive branch jobs—found it unfathomable
that the new administration would go out of its way to take procedures that largely already
existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem terms, such that
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