In his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagines the United States overtaken by fascism. Charles Lindbergh, the aviator and Nazi sympathizer, wins the Republican nomination for president and, with a pledge to keep America out of war, defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the election of 1940.
In the authoritarian administration that follows, Lindbergh enters into a nonaggression pact with Hitler and resettles Jews to the interior from cities such as Newark. Roth’s narrator — a boyhood version of the author — recalls a democracy all too capable of abandoning its values in the thrall of a hero turned president. It’s a terrifying alternate history that challenges the idea it couldn’t happen here.
Roth’s is a work of fiction. But the nightmare has happened in the U.S. In the 1830s, Native Americans were removed by force from their homelands east of the Mississippi River and resettled in Oklahoma. In 1942, the government resettled Americans of Japanese descent from their homes in Northern California to camps in the interior. Two years later, in Korematsu v. United States, a majority of the Supreme Court authorized the internment.
This month, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on a ban on visitors from five predominantly Muslim countries that followed statements by President Trump before and after he took office that he intended to bar Muslims from entering the U.S.
Trump also is leading attacks on allies such as German prime minister Angela Merkel while failing to criticize populists like Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, who has called for a census of that country’s Roma population to determine which should be deported. “Make no mistake, there is a concerted attack on the constitutional liberal order,” Constanze Stelzenmuller, a German scholar at the Brookings Institution, told the Financial Times. “And it is being spearheaded by the president of the United States.”
Last year, 68.5 million men, women and children across the world were forced to leave their homes as a result of persecution, violence, conflict or violations of their human rights, according to a report released last Tuesday by the UN Refugee Agency. The total includes 25.5 million refugees and 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
The numbers tell of misery for the people forced to abandon their homes and, in many instances, to seek refuge in a foreign country. That includes people who seek asylum in the U.S., children in tow, because they fear for their lives in Central American countries plagued by violence.
On the day the UN issued its report, the president addressed a trade group in Washington, where he mocked the Refugee Act of 1980, which offers asylum to immigrants who can document “a well-founded fear of persecution.” According to the president, lawyers for asylum seekers advise their clients “exactly what to say.” He continued:
“They say, ‘Say the following:’ — they write it down — ‘I am being harmed in my country. My country is extremely dangerous. I fear for my life.’ ‘Say that. Congratulations. You’ll never be removed.’ This is given to them by lawyers who are waiting for them to come up… But, in a way, that’s cheating because they’re giving them statements. They’re not coming up for that reason. They’re coming up for many other reasons and sometimes for that reason.”
As Trump sees it, invoking the law in pursuit of asylum constitutes cheating. Meanwhile, his administration has separated children of asylees from their parents without recording clearly which kids belong to which parents and without plans (or, apparently, the ability) to reunite them.
Whatever you think of the immigration laws and the need to revise them, the people who invoke them are asserting their rights set forth in the statute. Words have legal significance, including the words uttered by someone who seeks asylum in America.
Trump himself knows the power of words to trigger laws. Or at least he does when it serves his interest to invoke them. Like when the president stated 16 times in one interview last winter that there was “no collusion” between Russians and him to influence the 2016 election.
Some other words that Trump has uttered bear on the immigration crisis he has incited. They’re in the Constitution, which prescribes the oath Trump swore at his inauguration, when he pledged to “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States.”