It makes a certain awful sense that Trump’s lackeys would stage the president’s promised mass deportations as a media event. On Sunday, “border czar” Tom Homan invited TV’s Dr. Phil McGraw to “embed” with him on a mission to arrest immigrants in Chicago, viewing the inside of a “command center” and narrating arrests, all streamed as “exclusive” programming on Dr. Phil’s own channel (launched when his long-running CBS show was canceled, after McGraw welcomed the far right and conspiracy theorists to his couch). Immigration and Customs Enforcement have said they lack the manpower and necessary logistics to implement the Laken Riley Act, requiring they arrest every undocumented person accused of low-level theft offenses; if that is true, they certainly lack the resources to arrest, detain, and remove from the U.S. the millions of immigrants that Trump claims will be deported under his watch. But what Homan can do right now is put on a show.
Dr. Phil is here to livestream your arrest is almost too stupid to take seriously. But that may prove to be the defining feature of life under the second Trump administration: For now, to survive and move strategically, we will have to live with the whiplash of having to take the cruelty of men who are not very bright very seriously.
There is no shortage of not very bright guys to point to: from the new head of the Department of Defense Pete Hegseth, whose qualifications include running two different veterans’ nonprofits into the ground and showing up to work drunk (along with multiple allegations of sexual misconduct), to Kristi Noem, the admitted puppy-killing governor of South Dakota—not a guy, but now running the agency housing ICE, the Department of Homeland Security. It feels a bit gauche to point to the typos and bizarre syntax of the Trump executive orders (ghostwritten by AI, some suspect) and other official releases (they will “catch criminal aliens—including murders and rapists,” a DHS spokesperson promised). But of all Trump’s lackluster crew, Tom Homan has had the most opportunity to do the most harm very badly.
Phil McGraw may seem ridiculous with his attempts to parrot the militaristic lingo of anti-immigration cops like Homan, a verbal shock-and-awe campaign in which arrests are “surgical”; human beings are “high-value targets.” But this is part of the propaganda. The immigrants they will arrest are “dangerous people,” McGraw said in one video shot in a nice-looking hotel room. “If they resist,” said McGraw in another video, “if they open fire on the agents who have to return fire, then people can get caught in the crossfire.” After the pair had encountered immigrants without any such threats to their safety, the story expanded. “We’re saving children,” Homan told McGraw’s cameras. “Every sexual predator we arrest means more saved children.” We are left only with Homan’s tough-guy talk as proof that anyone they arrested was a threat to children. (When McGraw asked one man if he had been “charged with sex crimes against children,” as Homan claimed, the man appropriately refused to answer his questions and said, “I want to talk to my lawyer.”) McGraw is there because he poses no threat to the ridiculous, dangerous story Homan and Trump want told, the one Homan tends to describe in broad movie-poster taglines— “The cavalry is on its way,” or “The border is our theater of war.”
Despite giving “exclusive” access to the Chicago arrests to McGraw’s channel, Homan has also recently guest-starred in content for far-right social media influencers. Homan boasted about his Chicago operation to Ben Bergquam of Real America’s Voice, who reportedly rode along with Homan. “We took a lot of bad guys off the street today,” Homan told Bergquam vaguely, repeating the line in a few variations but offering no details. If you want someone who will spread your message of fear with no reporting added, Bergquam is a decent choice, one who has spent years promoting pernicious conspiracy theories: about a butterfly sanctuary’s purported involvement in sex trafficking and immigration crimes (it temporarily shut down over the resulting harassment), and about ivermectin being an effective treatment for Covid-19 (it’s not). Border911, the immigration “education” nonprofit founded by high-profile election deniers, which Homan helmed until earlier this month, considers Bergquam “part of our team unofficially.” The pipeline from professional conspiracy-theory content creators to the Trump administration is short, and Tom Homan travels along it with ease.
Is what Homan is doing any less dangerous because he is doing it with people who can be easily dismissed as professional cranks and conspiracy theorists? It can feel almost insulting to have to take any of this seriously as politics. But it’s worse than that: These people hold the safety of millions in their hands. Every time one of these “operations” is promised, it kicks off a cycle: People fear that officers they don’t recognize at their schools and churches and emergency rooms may be ICE officials; immigrants’ rights groups get reports of immigration raids that they then have to investigate. Immigrants make decisions about whether it’s worth the risk to send their kids to school, or go to a church service, or take someone sick to the doctor, based on a swirl of questionable information, amplified by a chorus of would-be immigration enforcers in far-right media, in a media environment in which more reputable sources grow rarer by the day.
The enforcers and influencers of Trump 2.0 are producing cartoonishly bad, low-effort material—such as the bombastic remarks from acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove after observing the Chicago arrests, celebrating his federal agents for “deploying in lockstep” with ICE to combat “a national emergency arising from four years of failed immigration policy,” or Homan using a Fox appearance to take a little swipe at Selena Gomez—“No apologies”—for a since-deleted Instagram video in which she wept over escalating immigration arrests. Nevertheless, the climate of uncertainty and danger kicked up even by something as sick and laughable as “Dr. Phil: Gestapo Live” is what we live with now. “Forget the myths the media has created about the White House,” goes the movie version of some advice, delivered with appropriate acidity, from a secret source to a young reporter in All the President’s Men. “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” Just because these people are ineffective, conspicuously incompetent goons doesn’t mean they aren’t goons—and doesn’t mean they can be dismissed.
