The Republican Party Moves From Family Values To White Nationalism

Sitting in the Cabinet Room on Wednesday, surrounded by a largely white, male group of Republican lawmakers and administration officials, President Trump attempted to defuse a bomb of his own making. “We have compassion, we want to keep families together,” he said as he signed an executive order ending the family separations that commenced at his own administration’s directive. “It’s very important.”

The fit of compassion did not last long—not even through the end of the president’s remarks. A few moments later, Trump added, “But we still have to maintain toughness or our country will be overrun by people, by crime, by all of the things that we don’t stand for—and that we don’t want.”

Much as the unrepentant issue an apology before backsliding into retribution, Trump knew, politically, that he had to signal concern for the plight of these families, but could not, emotionally, make the sale. By that evening, at a rally in Minnesota, the president’s vitriol was back at full throttle. “They’re not sending their finest,” he said of the asylum seekers. “We’re sending them the hell back. That’s what we’re doing.”

The plight of these migrant families is wrenching, but it is also instructive—revealing a fundamental shift in the priorities of the Republican Party. “Family values” once defined the GOP, informing its embrace of the pro-life platform (protecting unborn children) and its resistance to marriage equality (the union between a husband and wife was sacrosanct). Conservative lawyers led the campaign to censor rap lyrics, and evangelicals condemned extramarital affairs—conservative foot soldiers, for a time, marched under the banner of protecting children and preserving the institution of the family.

But in the Trump era, it is clear these values no longer define the movement. Family values would never have permitted the separation of babies from their mothers and fathers, the incarceration of toddlers, the placement of grade schoolers in shelters with histories of sexual and physical abuse. Nor would family values have allowed the disregard of families already separated: There is no plan in place to reunite the 2,342 children who have been taken from their parents. The former director of ice, John Sandweg, told my colleague Priscilla Alvarez that it is entirely possible these children and their parents will remain permanently separated. But to hear it in conservative news outlets, such concern—what will happen to these children now?—is a tedium of leftist whining.

Family values, further, would not permit policies likely to ensure these families will be kept apart: In early May, the administration announced its intention to begin screening sponsor families for their citizenship status—this includes extended family seeking to take in immigrant children who have been separated from their mothers and fathers (such screening would include biometric data, like fingerprinting). To place the specter of deportation over an immigrant family is to practically guarantee that its members will remain in the shadows, leaving unaccompanied children to find a home elsewhere—likely in foster care, with strangers. It is to ensure that the family unit, once broken, remains broken.

Trump has instead redefined his party around white nationalism, which deems brown-skinned men, women, and children of degraded humanity—and therefore absent any inherent value and unworthy of protection. You could see that this week as the president compared immigrant men, women, and children to vermin (they want to “infest our country,” he tweeted). You could see it when his deputy, Stephen Miller, painted migrants as menaces—not candidates for asylum, but rather incarceration:

Reading from a list of arrests in Philadelphia in May 2017, Mr. Miller recounted the crimes committed by illegal immigrants: murder, child neglect, negligent manslaughter, car theft, prostitution, racketeering, rape. “It is impossible to take moral lectures from people like the mayor of Philadelphia, who dance in jubilant celebration over ‘sanctuary cities,’ when you had innocent Americans, U.S.-born and foreign, who are victimized on a daily basis because of illegal immigration,” Mr. Miller said.

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