Trump and the return of the National ‘Emergy’

In October 2018, a “migrant caravan” bound for the United States set out on foot from Honduras. Then-president Donald Trump, never one to pass up an opportunity for overzealous xenophobic spectacle, took to Twitter to broadcast a “National Emergy”, warning that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the caravan. In preparation for the pedestrian assault on the country, Trump ordered 5,200 active-duty US military troops to be deployed to the southern border along with helicopters, heaps of razor wire, and other “emergy” equipment. And on the US side, it’s an entirely bipartisan affair that only becomes more transparently nefariously bonkers when Trump is at the helm; recall, for example, the man’s reported vision in 2019 of a US-Mexico frontier that included a “water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” and a wall with “spikes on top that could pierce human flesh”. Paradoxically, it’s also a war on the US itself, which cannot exist in its current form without the assistance of mass undocumented labour – the very folks Trump is threatening with the “largest deportation operation” in US history.