The Old Fangs of MAGA’s New Nativism

Since Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, the Republican Party has increasingly embraced nativism as its political brand. Trump’s initial focus on violent “illegal” immigrants made this 21st century nativism more palatable to many voters, including the many Latino voters who turned out in record numbers for the candidate in 2024. But many of those same voters find the 2024 version repulsive.

Yet one year after Trump’s comeback, public sentiment appears to be shifting decisively away from MAGA nativism. The president’s slipping polls on immigration — previously one of his strongest issues with voters — suggests that Americans do not support the scale or brutality of his deportation crusade, which has largely targeted people with no criminal charges or convictions. It may also reflect a growing realization that MAGA nativism is less about keeping “criminals” off the streets than it is about reversing the “browning of America.” 

The president has led the way in demonizing the country’s foreign-born population of 50 million people, including its 25 million-plus naturalized citizens. In his rambling, conspiracy-laden rant on Thanksgiving Day, Trump made it clear that his nativist agenda has an issue with all immigrants, full stop. In addition to singling out entire ethnic groups like the Somali community in Minnesota, Trump accused most foreign-born people of being parasites and criminals who were sent to America from “prisons” and “mental institutions.

This renewed focus on legal immigrants — along with growing calls from Republicans to revoke citizenship from naturalized Americans like Zohran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar — seems to come from a belated recognition that, even if the Trump administration succeeded in deporting every undocumented person in the country, it would fail to solve what far-right nativists and white nationalists regard as the greatest threat facing America: a near-future where whites are a minority.

The recent escalation in rhetoric against legal immigrants and naturalized citizens demonstrates the true extent of the far-right’s takeover of the GOP, whose leading figures now openly traffic in white nationalist talking points and conspiracy theories. Indeed, for all the recent talk in the press about the MAGA “civil war,” the current intraparty divide is more akin to the dispute between Hitlerites and Strasserites in the early days of the Nazi party than the battle among Rockefeller Republicans, Goldwater Republicans and Birchers in mid-20th century America. Despite real differences over domestic and foreign policy, most Republicans now agree that America faces a civilizational threat from foreign “invaders.” 

The Trump administration recently spelled this out in its national security strategy paper, which warned that Europe was facing the prospect of “civilizational erasure” due to mass migration coupled with a declining birth rate among the native white population. “Should present trends continue,” it declares, “the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less.” This is more or less an exact narrative that white nationalists have been peddling for decades, often under the banner of “the great replacement” or “white genocide.”

Before the theory’s wider embrace among Republicans, Tucker Carlson was one of its leading popularizers. He regularly used his old perch at Fox News to postulate an elite conspiracy to replace (predominantly white) native-born Americans with (predominantly nonwhite) immigrants. 

Carlson often traced the start of this “great replacement” to 1965, when Congress repealed the racist 1924 national origins law, which had barred all immigrants from Asia and dramatically curtailed immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in response to a nativist backlash. Then, as now, nativists depicted immigrants — at the time mostly Italians, Poles, Slavs and Jews — as dangerous “aliens” who were bringing crime and importing foreign ideologies like Bolshevism into America. The years leading up to the 1924 restriction law also saw the publication of popular books written by alarmed white supremacists like Madison Grant (“The Passing of the Great Race,” 1916) and Lothrop Stoddard (“The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” 1920), who warned of grave dangers facing the “Nordic race” as inferior immigrants flooded into the country (Adolf Hitler was a big fan of Grant’s book, later describing it as his personal “bible”). 

In recent months, Carslon has become an increasingly polarizing figure among Republicans, particularly since his decision to platform the openly white nationalist and antisemitic Nick Fuentes on his popular podcast in October. Following that incident, the former Fox News host was condemned by numerous Republican politicians, with one accusing him of leading a “modern-day Hitler Youth” and labeling him “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” 

Yet, Carlson’s Republican critics were neither moderates nor opponents of hateful and inflammatory rhetoric or the demonization of entire population groups. Instead, the man accusing him of leading a new Hitler Youth was none other than Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., who just last week called for the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in America in response to the mass shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia (ironically, the heroic bystander who disarmed one of the shooters was a Muslim man himself).

For all its apparent infighting, then, today’s GOP is the most uniformly (and explicitly racially) nativist it’s been since the 1920s, when Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act into law to keep America “American” (that is, majority white and preferably Anglo-Protestant).

The GOP’s real civil war can be traced back to the early 1990s, when former Nixon adviser Pat Buchanan challenged incumbent president George H.W. Bush for the 1992 Republican nomination. Buchanan was, as many have since noted, the original MAGA candidate. From the border wall to protectionism to the racist dog whistles against Mexican immigrants, the right-wing populist paved the way for Trump. He also led the way in portraying mass immigration as a Third World “invasion” and “conquest” of America, likening it to the barbarian destruction of ancient Rome in a 1992 speech:

As America’s imperial troops guard frontiers all over the world, our own frontiers are open, and the barbarian is inside the gates. And you do not deal with the Vandals and Visigoths who are pillaging your cities by expanding the Head Start and food stamp programs.

Buchanan’s two presidential campaigns in the ’90s attracted an array of conservative and anti-immigrant groups along with right-wing intellectuals who had grown disillusioned with the GOP of the Reagan and Bush years. As John Ganz compellingly shows in his recent book “When the Clock Broke,” the real ideological battles on the right occurred during this period, when “paleoconservative” commentators like Samuel Francis and Murray Rothbard railed against the triumphant neocons who would largely retain influence over the GOP until the implosion of the second Bush presidency years later. If the neocons were largely disillusioned postwar liberals who had been “mugged by reality,” the paleos were hardened reactionaries who wanted to turn back the clock not just on immigration but on racial equality and civil rights more broadly. As Ganz observes …  

If the neocons held up mid-century New York as the height of U.S. civilization, the paleos wanted to go much further back: to the 1920s at least, and preferably back to the nineteenth century, to the world before Lincoln and the Civil War.

The collapse of the neocon project in the first decade of the 21st century provided a long-awaited opening for the disgruntled reactionaries and nativists who saw the GOP’s tacit embrace of globalism and multiculturalism as a betrayal of the Old Right’s values. After the nativist right’s preferred candidate finally won in 2016, the GOP’s evolution into a xenophobic party with a growing white nationalist wing proceeded rapidly. 

Ten years after Trump’s first election, it is unclear how many Republican voters disagree with the notion that immigrants are “invading” the country or that there is a concerted effort by globalist elites to undermine American and Western civilization by “importing” nonwhite immigrants to “replace” white majority populations. There are slight disagreements, of course. Some nativists see Islam as the great evil (Fine) while others are more preoccupied with the growing Latino population (Carlson). Regardless, hard-line nativists are firmly in control of the party. There is no faction determined to keep the far-right barbarians at the gates. Instead, the nativists are fighting among themselves to determine whose brand of white nationalism will carry the day.