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 under secretary 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 D.E.I. programs throughout the federal government, but this worldview takes that process to its illogical extreme: If the quest for a diverse work force is prohibited, its opposite must be the best, the only, work force 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 MAGA 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?
