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Over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of MAGA personalities, triggering vicious attacks and even calls for his ouster. What was this grave transgression? Well, Mullin dared to suggest that if handled correctly, immigration can be made to work in the national interest, which is something MAGA cannot permit to be true or uttered anywhere in public.That’s not how these MAGA figures put it, of course. Instead, they’re claiming Mullin revealed that he’s falling woefully short of Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations. But if you scratch the surface of this dustup, it lays bare the true ideological aims of the MAGA white nationalist project with unusual vividness—and exposes a deep political weakness in the whole Trump-MAGA immigration agenda.Mullin’s comments came during a meeting on Saturday of the bipartisan National Governors Association in Oklahoma. In a long monologue, Mullin talked about why immigration reform is so hard, then discussed the need for changes to visa processes that currently facilitate seasonal labor even as much farmwork is now year-round.“If we’re looking to grow our economy, then we need to look at making more permanent solutions on this,” Mullin said, adding that the “narrative” that immigrants steal Americans’ jobs is “not true for all industries,” such as agriculture. Mullin added:It is America First. We want to take care of Americans first. It’s our economy. It’s our homeland. But there’s a way to utilize labor where we’re not having the participation rate where we need to. And we can plug those holes.These remarks triggered extraordinary offense among MAGA figures. Fox News personality Tomi Lahren raged that Mullin is out to “appease liberal media.” Laura Loomer called on Trump to fire Mullin immediately. Podcasters Steve Bannon and Jack Posobiec both told Politico that MAGA wants Trump to replace Mullin with someone who, as Posobiec put it, “puts deportations first.”The key tell here lies in what Mullin actually said. By “utilize labor” to “plug holes,” Mullin meant we should make it easier for migrant workers to fill currently unfilled jobs, particularly in agriculture. In other words, Mullin let slip a very dirty secret indeed: By reforming governing processes, we can broaden legal pathways for immigrants to work in the United States in ways that would benefit our economy and our country.Ask yourself this: Why exactly does MAGA cast this suggestion as a threat to the broader project of mass deportations? It’s not as if Mullin’s Department of Homeland Security has backed down on them: Migrant detentions just hit a new high, arrests have surged, and deportations appear to be escalating. What’s actually threatening to the MAGA project, then, is the underlying idea that Mullin endorsed: that immigration can be made to function in the national interest—and more to the point, that the right reforms actually can accomplish this and make it a reality.A darkly amusing cycle has kicked in here. The Trump administration keeps accidentally admitting that more immigration can indeed benefit our economy—and then quickly suppressing that truth when MAGA erupts over it. In June 2025, for instance, Trump openly declared that due to mass deportations—his own policy—the agriculture and hospitality industries were losing many “good” and “longtime” workers, and he pledged to carve out deportation exceptions for them. But Stephen Miller quickly prevailed on Trump to reverse the decision—just as MAGA is now raging at Mullin for making a similar suggestion.It’s easy to see why this keeps happening: The admission wrecks MAGA mythology on a very deep level. A core MAGA idea is that mass purgings of immigrants are needed because they take the jobs of Americans, of course. But the deeper idea here is that this deprives young American men of good, honest, breadwinning work, leaving them moldering away in left-behind areas of the heartland. In short, immigrants are a primary cause of the social crisis afflicting young MAGA men. Indeed, this social crisis has been deliberately engineered by liberal elites—it’s a key component of the “great replacement” of MAGA America with the “Third World.” In this story, mass deportations and putting the brakes on mass unskilled immigration should mean all these young American men will come stampeding into new jobs left vacant by now-deported invaders, and their families and communities will flourish.But it isn’t happening. Paul Krugman recently illustrated that this economic story is now in shambles: The virtual end of net immigration hasn’t led to a boom in jobs for the native-born. Growth in the working-age population has stalled, but so has job creation, and the employment rate for native-born adults is lower, not higher, than it was before the pogroms began.Meanwhile, studies have found that recent surges in mass deportations have cost Americans jobs in local economies without boosting wages for the native-born.Indeed, if anything, Mullin’s admission was far too narrow. He insisted immigrants are taking American jobs in some areas (a story that, again, is simply unsupported), while allowing that in agriculture, deportations are hurting the economy.Yet even this qualified admission triggered MAGA. Because every time someone like Mullin effectively admits, even in a limited way, that deporting immigrant laborers is not resulting in more work for Americans—that creating more legal pathways would boost the economy—it casts doubt on the larger MAGA ruse behind it all. It’s the coup de grâce that Mullin described his suggestions as the actual “America First” stance. I suspect he doesn’t grasp just how dangerous a heresy this truly is. After all, it neatly exposes MAGA’s real position: Mass deportations must be carried out even if they hurt the economy. Mullin must “put deportations first”—that is, he must put them before economic concerns. The goal is not primarily an economic one: It’s about ethnically purging the country. Trump’s deportations are badly underwater in polls, including in swing states. If more voters understood the actual Trump-MAGA position to be that deportations must be maximized regardless of their economic impact—that maximal removals are preferable to having a better economy—Americans would recoil even more. No wonder MAGA wants Mullin to shut up and stop giving away its vile scam in public.

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President Trump’s giant “triumphal arch” project is not only going to be big and ugly, it’ll also be in your way.According to a recent assessment by the National Park Service, the proposed arch design will irrevocably detract from Washington, D.C.’s carefully planned views and historic properties. The assessment lists, in detail, 37 significant historic sites in the capital city at risk for adverse effects.“Adverse effects” means “you’re building something that will irreversibly harm the experience in these other locations,” National Parks Conservation Association vice president for government affairs Ed Stierli told The New York Times.“These adverse effects are intentional and inherent in the design of the arch; it is intended to dominate the surrounding landscape,” Virginia State Historic Preservation Officer Roger W. Kitchen wrote in a letter to the Park Service in June.The Memorial Avenue Corridor—the stretch between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, which includes Robert E. Lee’s historic Arlington House and the Kennedy Gravesite—is most at risk, as the 250-foot triumphal arch will alter and obstruct views from each site, the assessment explains.“The entirety of the corridor forms a major component of the monumental core of Washington, D.C. and was conceived as both a ceremonial gateway to the nation’s Capital and a symbolic landscape commemorating national unity and reconciliation following the Civil War,” the document reads. “The bridge alignment and associated ceremonial landscape were intended to physically and symbolically unite North and South through a coordinated monumental composition extending across the Potomac River.”And now there will be a big Trump shrine smack in the middle of it.This latest Park Service assessment on the proposed project’s impact on the surrounding landscape is an essential step in the administration’s mission to receive final approval for construction from the National Capital Planning Commission.As a federal undertaking, the arch project is subject to Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, which mandates an adverse effects assessment, but does not require any particular outcome or changes to the project. Instead, the assessment is “meant to get agencies to pause, consult experts and the public, and consider alternatives or design changes,” The New York Times’ Emily Badger explains.There have been alternative designs proposed—smaller arches, which were not considered sufficiently “representative” of the 250-year American independence milestone, and alternative locations beyond the historic heart of the city—but the project is expected to move forward as originally planned.Incidentally, the Park Service assessment comes as the Trump administration pushes to dramatically overhaul the process under which construction projects in historical areas are reviewed—a thinly veiled attempt to make it easier for Trump to redesign the nation’s capital in his own image. Under the proposed rules, “visual, atmospheric, or audible” adverse effects of building projects would be of no consequence, and federal agencies would be empowered to approve projects without the input of historical experts or the public.