We are living through a moment where the phrase “ethnic cleansing” is being rebranded as a lifestyle choice by the Department of Homeland Security, but because this is America in 2025, the branding feels less like a terrifying historical echo and more like a drop-shipped product that arrived three weeks late in a crushed box. The Trump administration’s embrace of “remigration”—a term lifted directly from the European identitarian movement, which is itself a polite dinner party euphemism for “get in the cattle car”—amounts to a bargain-basement attempt at demographic engineering. It is the kind of racist authoritarian starter kit you would accidentally order from Temu at 3:00 AM, complete with peeling decals of eagles and a warning label that reads “Assembly Required, Competence Not Included.”
The malice is real. The cruelty is genuine. But the execution? The execution has the structural integrity of a lawn chair bought at a discount pharmacy.
This is the central paradox of the second term. We are being asked to fear a regime that wants to be the Third Reich but operates with the efficiency of a Spirit Halloween store setting up in an abandoned Circuit City. They have the hate. They have the list of enemies. They have the desire to reshape the American populace into a monochrome fantasy of 1950s sitcom demographics. But every time they try to turn the key on the doomsday machine, the engine sputters, the hubcaps fall off, and the press secretary has to go on television to explain that the smoke pouring from the hood is actually “freedom steam.”
The “Remigration” of Reality
Let’s start with the “remigration” rhetoric itself. This is not a policy proposal; it is a hallucination. The idea that you can round up millions of people—many of them naturalized citizens, legal residents, or the backbone of entire industries—and simply “return” them to countries that may not even recognize them is a logistical impossibility. It would require a surveillance state so vast, a transportation network so complex, and a legal apparatus so robust that it would make the D-Day invasion look like a trip to the grocery store.
The Trump administration, however, seems to believe that if they just tweet the word “REMIGRATION” in all caps often enough, the laws of physics and economics will bend the knee. They are treating ethnic cleansing like a visualization exercise. They are trying to manifest a white ethnostate through the power of positive thinking and mean posts on Truth Social.
This disconnect between the scale of the evil and the capacity of the perpetrators creates a specific kind of vertigo. We are watching a group of people who couldn’t organize a two-car funeral trying to organize the mass expulsion of the Global South. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan are drafting plans that require the precision of a Swiss watch, but they are working with tools made of Play-Doh. They want to create a terrifyingly efficient police state, but they keep tripping over their own shoelaces in federal court because they forgot to file the paperwork on time.
The danger, of course, is that even a clumsy attempt at ethnic sorting destroys lives. You don’t need to be efficient to be destructive. A toddler with a hammer can’t build a house, but they can certainly smash a window. And right now, the administration is smashing every window in the house of democracy, hoping that the draft will make the “non-compatible” people leave on their own.
The Justice Department as a Vending Machine
The “Temu Dictatorship” vibe extends perfectly to their weaponization of the Justice Department. In a truly terrifying authoritarian regime, the secret police are silent, efficient, and omnipresent. In the Trump regime, the “secret police” are loudly announcing their intentions on podcasts and then getting their indictments thrown out of court because the prosecutor wasn’t legally hired.
The pursuit of the “enemies list”—James Comey, Letitia James, Jack Smith—has been a masterclass in ineptitude. They want show trials. They want the spectacle of the perp walk. But they keep forgetting that the American legal system, battered as it is, still has a few annoyingly persistent features, like statutes of limitations and the requirement that prosecutors actually hold a valid commission.
Attorney General Pam Bondi is running the Department of Justice like it’s a customer service desk for the President’s grievances. “Press one to indict a Democrat. Press two to pardon a crony. Press three to ignore a subpoena.” But the machine keeps eating the quarters. The indictments are flimsy. The legal theories are laughed out of court. They are trying to use the law as a bludgeon, but they are holding it by the wrong end.
This doesn’t mean the intent isn’t horrifying. The desire to lock up political opponents is the hallmark of tyranny. But the failure to do so effectively turns the tragedy into a farce. It reduces the Department of Justice to a menacing prop in a reality show, a scary background set piece that falls over if you lean on it too hard.
The Toy Soldiers on the Street
Then we have the military cosplay. The President’s obsession with deploying troops to American cities is the ultimate expression of the “strongman with a malfunctioning action figure” aesthetic. He wants the visual of tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue. He wants the feeling of martial law. But every time he tries to order it, he runs into the friction of reality.
The generals drag their feet. The governors refuse the help. The Posse Comitatus Act, dusty and battered, still manages to trip him up. So instead of a terrifying occupation, we get security theater. We get National Guard troops standing awkwardly in subway stations, checking bags and looking bored, while the “carnage” they are supposed to stop continues unabated because you cannot solve systemic poverty with a guy in camouflage holding a rifle.
It is authoritarianism as a photo op. It is the use of the military not to achieve a strategic objective, but to create B-roll for the next campaign ad. It degrades the armed forces, turning them into extras in the President’s personal action movie. And like most straight-to-DVD action movies, the plot makes no sense and the special effects are terrible.
The Jenga Tower of Government
Perhaps the most perfect example of the “clearance rack” approach to governance is the project to hollow out the federal state. The dismantling of agencies like the Department of Education or USAID feels less like a strategic demolition and more like a group of toddlers playing Jenga. They aren’t carefully removing the unnecessary pieces to streamline the structure. They are yanking out the load-bearing blocks because they like the sound it makes when the tower wobbles.
They fire the experts. They gut the budgets. They install loyalists who think “science” is a liberal conspiracy. And then, when a hurricane hits or a pandemic flares up, they stare at the rubble in confusion, wondering why the government doesn’t work anymore.
They broke it. They broke it on purpose. But they broke it with the sullen, unthinking energy of a vandal, not the calculated precision of a reformer. They are like a person who rips the copper wiring out of their own walls to sell for scrap, and then complains that the lights won’t turn on.
The corruption that accompanies this demolition is eye-watering. Billions of dollars are sprayed around like confetti at a parade for kleptocrats. Contracts go to friends. Regulations are rewritten to benefit donors. The swamp hasn’t been drained; it has been franchised. But even the corruption feels cheap. It lacks the grand, operatic scale of a true oligarchy. It’s petty. It’s grimy. It’s the corruption of a used car dealership, scaled up to the level of a superpower.
The Media Monopoly Game
Finally, we have the attempted capture of the free press. In a sophisticated authoritarian state, the government nationalizes the media and imposes strict censorship. In the Trump version, they just ask their billionaire friends to buy the outlets and ruin them.
Larry Ellison buys Paramount. Elon Musk buys Twitter (and renames it X, because he is twelve). Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post (and then hushes the editorial board). They treat the Fourth Estate like a collectible card game where the goal is to hoard all the holographic Charizards so no one else can play.
But this strategy, too, is fraying. They can buy the masthead, but they cannot buy the credibility. When they turn a news outlet into a propaganda organ, the audience leaves. The journalists resign. The “influence” they purchased evaporates because influence requires trust, and trust is the one thing you cannot buy on the secondary market.
They are left holding empty shells, shouting into megaphones that are disconnected from the speakers. They can control the supply of news, but they cannot control the demand for truth. People find other ways to know what is happening. The signal finds a way through the noise.
The Conclusion We Cannot Avoid
We are left with a regime so drenched in racist intent and authoritarian aspiration that it would be terrifying if it weren’t being executed with the slapstick chaos of a Three Stooges routine. But we must be careful not to let the laughter blind us to the danger.
A clumsy fascist is still a fascist. A broken chainsaw can still cut you if you fall on it. The “Temu Dictatorship” may be shoddy, cheap, and prone to falling apart, but it is still occupying the White House. The “remigration” plan may be a logistical fantasy, but the attempt to implement it will destroy real families. The Justice Department may be incompetent, but the fear it generates is real.
We are stuck in a dangerous liminal space. We are governed by people who want to be monsters but only have the competence to be bullies. They are the knockoff version of tyranny, the “Great Value” brand of oppression.
But here is the thing about knockoffs: sometimes, they are toxic. Sometimes, the cheap paint has lead in it. Sometimes, the battery explodes.
We can laugh at their incompetence. We should laugh at it, because mockery is a powerful solvent for fear. But we cannot dismiss them. Because even a bargain-basement dictator can do a hell of a lot of damage before the return policy kicks in. And right now, we are stuck with the product, and customer service isn’t picking up the phone.
Receipt Time
The true cost of this “discount authoritarianism” is not just the immediate damage to institutions or the economy. It is the degradation of our own standards. We start to grade them on a curve. We say, “Well, at least they didn’t successfully deport 20 million people; they only managed to deport 500,000 and crash the agricultural sector.” We start to accept the premise that the government is supposed to be cruel, even if we mock its inability to be efficiently cruel.
We must refuse to normalize the intent just because the execution is flawed. The desire to purge, to silence, and to rule by decree is the crime. The fact that they are bad at it is just the evidence. We need to look at the peeling decals, the missing parts, and the warning labels, and realize that this isn’t just a defective product. It is a defective ideology. And the only way to fix it is to throw the whole thing in the trash and start building something real again.