According to Trump, America is full of the wrong kind of people

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In its early days, the second Trump administration is delivering a clear message: The United States is full of the wrong kind of people.

Federal civil servants, for example, have been deemed the wrong kind of people. Their political and ideological allegiances are questionable, their ideas destructive and their low-productivity jobs not worth their salaries. Too many are lawbreakers or just “evil.” Whether they toil at the U.S. Agency for International Development or the Treasury, the CIA or the Food and Drug Administration, in Washington or throughout the country, they should look upon that fork in the road and opt to resign. In some cases, they should be purged.

Children born in the United States to parents in the country illegally — or to parents who are here legally but only temporarily, such as people on work or student visas — are also the wrong people. They are not true Americans and should not be granted the “gift” of citizenship.

Refugees and asylum-seekers are the wrong kind of people and should be prevented from entering the country. Transgender Americans lack the “humility and selflessness” needed in the U.S. armed forces, according to a Trump executive order, and can no longer serve. Former officials such as Mark Milley, who served as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Trump administration, are disloyal and undeserving of government protection or even of a Pentagon portrait. And anyone fitting a “diversity” category of any kind is automatically suspect, a convenient scapegoat whenever something — wildfires, plane crashes — goes wrong.

It’s a familiar political impulse, with antecedents that predate President Donald Trump’s terms in office. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, mused about the virtues of “real America” — those patriotic small towns that make up the “pro-America areas of this great nation.” (She later offered one of those I’m-sorry-if-it-came-out-wrong apologies.) But now we’ve gone from praising real America to parsing real Americans. And the audit is being conducted by a vengeful and decidedly unapologetic executive.

If, according to the Trump administration, so many people in the United States are the wrong kind of people, who makes up the right kind? Who belongs here — in our military, our government, our territory?

The administration invokes meritocracy as one way to answer those questions. As Trump put it in an executive order on his second day in office, “individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination” should be the overriding factors when hiring workers, not just in government but throughout “key sectors of American society.”

This directive might be more persuasive if Trump had followed it when selecting key members of his administration. Did Matt Gaetz, Trump’s first pick to serve as attorney general, possess the individual merit needed to lead the Justice Department? Does Tulsi Gabbard have the aptitude required to become director of national intelligence, or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to oversee the Department of Health and Human Services? Is Pete Hegseth the hardest-working option to run the Defense Department?

The answer is evident. Their merit is not found in professional experience or outstanding qualifications, but in their fealty to the president. (When new appointees are hailed as disrupters, remember that in the Trump era “disruptive” is a euphemism for “obedient.”)

The racial imperative behind determining the right and wrong people — recall, for example, Trump’s disdain for outsiders who supposedly poison the national bloodstream — fuses with arguments over merit. Darren Beattie, a former Trump speechwriter who has been named acting undersecretary of public diplomacy at the State Department, wrote late last year that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”

It would be one thing simply to roll back the excesses of diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government, but this worldview takes that process to its illogical extreme: If the quest for a diverse workforce is prohibited, its opposite must be the best, the only, workforce possible.

During his campaign for the U.S. Senate in 2021, JD Vance told a conservative podcast host that, should Trump regain the presidency, he needed to “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat” and proceed to “replace them with our people.” Vance’s use of “our people” has always stuck in my mind, mainly because I wonder who the future vice president had in his mind. Who counts as “our people” to this administration? Which marker of belonging makes someone theirs?

Trump has often referred to people in the first-person possessive. At times, he alludes to a category of people, as in “my judges” or “my generals,” but he has also claimed title to specific individuals, as in “my two Steves” (referring to Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller) and, in the case of one unfortunate former House speaker, “my Kevin.” Trump has also longed to see “my people” sit up at attention for him the way North Koreans do for Kim Jong Un.

With this last line, with “my people,” Trump may have been referring to his aides and underlings, or perhaps to his party, or maybe to the “Make America Great Again” movement, or to voters, or even Americans overall. That ambiguity captures the risks and the power inherent in a notion like “we the people.” When it does not include everyone, when it is malleable and shifting, you never know who counts, for how long, and who makes the calculation. Does Trump determine who is the right kind of person for America today? Does the Office of Management and Budget pick? Does Elon Musk decide who is part of the future and who gets tossed into the wood chipper?

Belonging has long been elusive in America, a “we” contested by wealth, race, sex and ancestry. In his second inaugural address, Trump warned that “our government confronts a crisis of trust,” but he also declared that, with his election victory, “national unity is now returning to America.” One could dismiss this vision of renewed civic harmony as an obligatory line, or just more Trumpian self-regard rather than a faithful reflection of reality.

But that misses the administration’s underlying project. National unity is indeed returning — if, that is, your conception of the nation is limited to those on your side, if only some of the people are really “the people.” This president prefers to lead a nation in which belonging is constantly up for grabs, in which certain people are the wrong kind and others are the right kind, in which some are real Americans and others will never be.

The result is not just a crisis of trust in our government, but in each other.

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.