Elon Musk’s ‘illegal’ past doesn’t seem like MAGA hypocrisy – Trump’s hate rally in New York shows why

Last week The Washington Post reported that Tesla’s CEO AND Donald Trump super-fan Elon Musk used to be, to use the term preferred by MAGA“illegal”. This means he did what the vast majority of illegal immigrants in the US do. After he came here legally, he overstayed his visa and then started working without legal permission. Investors were so worried that the South African would be deported that they even stipulated in their contracts that he would be granted legal status, creating a document confirming his “illegal” status. As for why readers should care, Post reporters offered the phrase “hypocrisy,” noting, “In recent months, Musk has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that ‘open borders’ and undocumented immigrants are destroying America.”

The MAGA world shrugged, but not because it’s particularly gifted at dealing with cognitive dissonance. No, they don’t see this story as evidence of hypocrisy. I generally hate semantic debates, but this one matters. The Post’s reporters wrongly assume that when Musk, Trump and their allies complain about “illegal immigrants,” they mean immigrants who do not have the proper documents to live and work in the US. But if you pay attention to how the word is used in context, it’s clear that Musk and company are using the word “illegal” as a category that includes all non-white immigrants and, increasingly, any native-born American citizen whose MAGA dislikes their skin color or ethnic origin. For MAGA, an undocumented white immigrant is OK. But a legal immigrant with darker skin – or even a native-born citizen – is “illegal.”

This is illustrated by a scan of Musk’s merciless tweets on this topic. AND Musk’s recent tweet in the middle of the night she screamed about “the scale of the Biden-Harris administration’s illegal voter importation program.” President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are not “importing” anyone. Other the tweets show that Musk is referring to immigrantsmost of whom are non-white, and who enter under international asylum law, which means they have a right to be here. This is not about “importing” immigrants, but about a government program that allows people who already wanted to move to move legally. By definition it is legal.

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Musk is not alone. Most of the time, when MAGA leaders say “illegals” or “illegal immigrants,” they are demonizing legal immigrants. When Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, spread the lie that Haitian immigrants steal and eat human animals, they weren’t just lying about their behavior. Yet they labeled them “illegal.” these people are participating in a government program that allows them to live and work in the U.S. When Vance was corrected during the vice presidential debate moderator Margaret Brennan, who told viewers that the Haitians in question had legal status, Vance whined, “You weren’t going to fact-check,” so obnoxiously that they cut off his microphone.

However, if there were any doubts that the “immigration” issue was about MAGA racism and not immigration, they were dispelled by speakers at Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. The comment that received the most press attention came from “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe, who told a series of racist jokes. Specifically, called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”” which no one took as a comment on the natural beauty of the famous vacation spot.

The comment attracted the lion’s share of media attention because it appeared in the early evening, drew rebuke from influential Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny, and – most importantly for the horse racing media – because Puerto Ricans living in the 50 states have the right to vote in elections presidential. But perhaps even more importantly, while pursuing a group of native citizens, Hinchcliffe gifted the game to MAGA. This is not and never has been about “immigration,” legal or otherwise. Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, but natural-born citizens with the same legal status as any random white guy at a restaurant in Iowa.

The Trump campaign released a nonsensical comment saying the “joke does not reflect President Trump’s views,” but it did we quickly checked whether the joke was loaded to the teleprompter. Campaign members knew exactly what Hinchcliffe would say and hesitated only when they were reminded how many Puerto Ricans vote in swing states. However, it is clear that the campaign spokeswoman lied because she did not disavow any of the many other racist jokes made by Hinchcliffe, such as tired joke about black people and watermelon and another complains about Latinos having children. The “humor” of the MAGA 2024 rally comes straight from the cartoons in KKK pamphlets from the 1950s.

Hinchcliffe was not alone. The entire rally was based on rhetoric aimed directly at denying Native American legitimacy, often in blatantly racist ways. Right-wing “influencer” Grant Cardone indicted Harris on having “pimps” and he said of Democratic voters: “We need it murder these people.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Harris, who was born a U.S. citizen in California, as a “Samoan-Malaysian, former California prosecutor with a low IQ.” Claim ‘low IQ’ means favorite unsubtle dog whistle Trump often refers to black people, after a lifelong obsession with racist pseudoscience eugenics. Carlson’s “joke” about Harris, who he knows full well has a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, is simply a trollish way of saying that all non-white people are the same – and that none of them are real Americans. By the time Trump speechwriter Stephen Miller took the stage and announced, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” there was no longer any doubt that “American” in the MAGA world only meant “white people.”

Trump’s speech also explained that that the expanding circle of people whose Americanness he denies now includes white people who oppose him and even simply dare to tell the truth about him at times. His current catchphrase, “enemies within,” has now grown to include Democratic elected officials and journalists. On Sunday, he said it was included “an amorphous group of people” for whom Biden and Harris are merely “vessels.” This is a sinister transformation of the system in which people vote for leaders who then represent their interests, i.e. democracy. While some pundits wring their hands over whether calling him a fascist “insults” Trump voters, the fascist GOP leader just declared that the majority of American voters – more than 81 million people – are un-American “enemies from within.”

MAGA rhetoric has gotten hot, but the idea that the only “real” Americans are people who look, act, and vote like them has been baked into Trumpism even before he first ran for the Republican nomination. Trump first began reporting national political news until 10 p.m promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama. At the time, the press took this conspiracy theory literally, as if it represented actual confusion among Republicans about whether Obama was a natural-born citizen. It is now obvious that, like most right-wing conspiracy theories, it is more symbolic and allows us to say that someone like Obama – black, liberal and cosmopolitan – cannot be a “real” American. The Big Lie, based on the assumption that voters in racially diverse cities are “fraud,” is more of the same. Republicans know that residents of Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta can vote legally, but they don’t think they should.

The same goes for the term “illegal”. The press unwisely takes this as a literal description of an immigrant who lives and works without proper documentation. Such a term would have applied to Musk in the past, but not to the Haitian immigrants whom Vance and Trump slandered. But when MAGA says “illegal,” they mean anyone they believe shouldn’t have the right to call themselves “American.” Coupled with “domestic enemies,” it is clear that this is an ever-expanding category of non-white immigrants, native-born people of color, and, increasingly, white liberals. It’s like the Nazi term “undesirable” in a broad sense. Therefore, it is no coincidence that Sunday’s rally looked like this just like the Nazi rally in 1939 in the same place.