Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen reflects on Trump’s devastating anti-immigrant policies, his treatment of allies, and the destructive history that led to this moment.
By Viet Thanh Nguyen
Many Americans feel that Donald Trump is betraying the country by destroying cherished American principles, while many American allies likewise feel betrayed by Trump’s abandonment of long-term loyalties. As a refugee from Vietnam, where the United States arguably let down its South Vietnamese allies, I do not think that the fickleness of American loyalty, or the consistency of American inconsistency when it comes to principles, is itself a surprise. What is astonishing for some is that the victims of these breaches of trust now include significant amounts of white people.
I grew up in a community of refugees who fled to the United States after the defeat of South Vietnam, and there was a sense among some that the United States had betrayed us. As a condition of its withdrawal from South Vietnam in 1973, the United States promised to come to the aid of South Vietnam, which had been required to build armed forces modeled on those of the United States and to follow military strategies dictated by American generals. When the final invasion by the northern communists happened in 1975, the United States did not send bombers and did not provide the ammunition and fuel that the South Vietnamese military needed for its American planes, tanks, and weapons.
The United States did rescue 130,000 South Vietnamese people, myself included, which led to the protagonist of my novel, The Sympathizer, saying that American aid would not have been necessary if America hadn’t invaded in the first place. The same sentiment could be said by America’s Afghan allies, or by Palestinians, whose plight could be illustrated by one of the more absurd and tragic scenes during Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza when the United States air-dropped pallets of aid onto a Gazan landscape already laid waste by American-supplied bombs. Part of the fury of the pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide protests that shook American campuses arose from the sense that Palestinians had been treated repeatedly with a bias for decades by a United States that clearly favored Israel. The rhetoric of the United States about advancing freedom and democracy seemed hollow to Palestinians when it supported an Israel that subjected them to occupation and apartheid.
The arrest of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil only reinforces this sense of a failure in American principles. Khalil has so far not been charged with a crime, except for being an outspoken Palestinian. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wants to deport him using an obscure provision – one that’s likely unconstitutional – that gives him the expansive authority to expel people on foreign policy grounds. Just as disturbing, Trump is now relying on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport, without due process, Venezuelan nationals who are alleged gangsters. According to the White House, they are not simply criminals, but terrorists and invaders “conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
A Betrayal that Is Not New
We in the United States should be rightly terrified of the implications that the United States government can deport anyone who it arbitrarily labels as a subversive. But we should also remember that this betrayal of American principles is not new and has been a repetitive part of American history, including the 1919 deportation of Emma Goldman and 249 others deemed as radicals by the government. Throughout the 19th century, mass deportations were carried out on a greater scale against Indigenous peoples, who were forced to move from their land to distant reservations, and in the 20th century against Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1930s (300,000 to nearly 2 million people sent to Mexico, many of them American citizens) and Japanese Americans during World War II (120,000 sent to concentration camps).
What has also happened before is the American willingness to betray its allies, which goes back to the very beginnings of European settlement of the land that would one day become the United States. Indigenous peoples who befriended or negotiated with European settlers would one day lose most or all of their land, and settlers and Americans who made treaties with Indigenous peoples would often break them.
Meanwhile, the foundational American principles regarding freedom, democracy, and equality, which, together with boundless economic opportunity, made up the mythological ideals of the “American Dream” and American exceptionalism, were not extended to all. Denying women the right to vote until 1920 or classifying enslaved Africans and their descendants as 3/5 of white people at the moment of American independence would seem to be a betrayal of these principles. Thus, the disappearance of Khalil, which his wife calls a “kidnapping,” is not new if seen in the light of earlier betrayals: Indigenous children being taken from their parents and sent to Christian schools meant to eradicate their Indigenous cultures, or enslaved people being kidnapped from Africa.
But for the supporters of Trump and his administration, which includes Elon Musk and shadowy backers like the tech mogul Peter Thiel, both of whom grew up in white South Africa, the real betrayal has been the betrayal of white people. They see “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies as codewords for a racism that has discriminated against white people and weakened the US. The parallel, perhaps, might be Trump’s tendency to think of alliances as signs of weakness. Who needs allies when one is a strongman and when one’s country is an imperial power? One only needs tributes and vassals.
Of course, history tells us such betrayal is not just limited to Trump. The demand for subservience and the reality of betrayal harkens back to a proudly white supremacist America of the 19th century, wherein nonwhite people can be included so long as they are subservient. They might even rise to high-profile positions, like JD Vance’s wife, Usha Vance, and the new FBI director, Kash Patel, both of Indian ancestries. There cannot be too many of them, however, for they are tokens.
The demand for subservience and the reality of betrayal is also extended to the proxies, conquests, subordinates, and actual foreign allies of the US, such as the Philippines, which the US supposedly liberated from Spain in 1898, only to betray it through colonizing it for the next 48 years. More recent examples include not only South Vietnam and Afghanistan, but also Iraq and Ukraine.
The Real Shock of Trump
The American threat of withholding military aid to Ukraine is, therefore, not new, and neither is the American disposal of its allies. The difference is that the people the US usually disposed of were not white. The European shock at being subject to this treatment is understandable, but should be contextualized in the history of how European countries, in alliance with the US, have also used, abused, and betrayed nonwhite peoples during colonization and its long aftermath.
The European and American consensus on the legitimacy of colonial and imperial rule masked the awful violence directed against nonwhite, colonized peoples, who rightly saw their treatment as a betrayal of the European Enlightenment ideals around liberty, freedom, and equality that so many of the colonized were taught in school. The shock of Trump is that he does not care about justification, the kind that Joe Biden called the international rules-based order. What Trump understands is that the international rules-based order is hypocritical, as demonstrated in the American support for Israel, which follows no rules except what it establishes. Likewise, Trump has made clear that the only rules and the only law are what he determines, which is simply the reduction into an essence of what Europeans and Americans have always done in regards to the colonized – just not to each other.
Europeans have the right to feel betrayed as they are forced to consider the possibility of a new world order dictated by the warlord and strongman. But they should also reflect on how they have already imposed that order on so many others throughout their colonial history of conquest, extraction, and exploitation that has helped to make the wealth and democracy of Europe possible. As for American supporters of Trump, some have already begun to sense that they, too, are disposable, for his economic policies will mostly benefit the very elite of American society, while his determination to turn the entire country into a free-fire zone of cultural warfare against hordes of terrifying others will undoubtedly devastate some of his hopeful nonwhite voters.
Trump and what he represents – abroad and at home – is destructive, but the proper response is not simply to repeat the hypocrisies of the past and present. Instead, we should all creatively imagine more just societies that would not allow his kind the opportunity to make a world utterly ruled by the brutal logic of overwhelming power and naked capitalism.
