Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who was supposed to bring some order to the department after the tenure of Kristi Noem and her aide, Corey Lewandowski, caused a panic last week when he threatened to remove federal customs officers from municipalities classified as “sanctuary cities.” Such a blunderbuss punishment, likely illegal, could bring international travel to a standstill amid the World Cup and summer vacation season. Accompanied by a vow to divert air traffic to cities in red states, Mullin’s plan is punitive, wild, and—fortunately—bluster.
As with so many administration actions, one wonders about the motivation behind the madness. Mullin and his bosses, President Donald Trump and Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Stephen Miller, know this is an idle threat: Airlines cannot reshuffle flights this way. The economic fallout would be immediate and dramatic. Cities and airlines would fight a crazed federal intervention in the private sector, and of course, so would the rest of the tourism and hospitality industries. Voters are already furious with Trump over the economy and high oil prices. Why screw up summer, too?
The Homeland Security secretary is following a Trump-era pattern: taking (or threatening to take) extreme action around immigration enforcement that cannot be explained by political calculus, policy outcomes, or even racial animus. What makes more sense is that Trump officials—and Trump himself—believe the most deranged conspiracists who claim that Democrats only win elections because noncitizens are voting in massive numbers.
This explains why Trump’s drumbeat of lies around the 2020 election has grown louder and his actions weirder, like the attempts to access state voter rolls in Minnesota and the seizure of 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia. Many see these gambits as an attempt to steal elections or to refuse to certify Democratic victories in the midterms. Perhaps. But they could also be driven by a genuine paranoia that Democratic forces and undocumented migrants will unfairly steal the election.
It sounds too weird to be true, but in the Trump era, frequently, the dumbest explanation is often the right one. Trump’s Greenland gambit isn’t about national security so much as the fact that Trump—being a real estate guy—eyes the world’s largest island as an enticing piece of land, given its outsized appearance on Mercator projection maps. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) destroyed the United States Agency for International Development, not to save money, but because far-right influencers bloviated that USAID funded the president’s enemies.
Far-right conspiracy theorists would seem to drive Trump’s latest nuttiness. Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard showing up at the raid of the Elections Operation Center in Fulton County, Georgia, where the FBI grabbed over 600 boxes of 2020 election ballots, is confounding at first, since the CIA plays no role in domestic law enforcement. But to those who have followed the unsubstantiated fever swamp of claims about Dominion voting machines hacked by Venezuela, there’s obviously international subterfuge at work. Trump pushed such claims after extraditing Venezuela’s former president Nicolás Maduro. No wonder he wants to replace the unqualified Gabbard with the even more unqualified Bill Pulte, the housing official and fellow real estate nepo baby, who almost got into a fistfight with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
If you believe the most outlandish conspiracy theories, then it makes sense that DOGE employees allegedly turned over sensitive Social Security information to a right-wing advocacy group to “find evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain states.” Trump has repeatedly claimed he won Minnesota in 2016, 2020, and 2024. I say “claim” rather than “lie” because it’s difficult to know whether Trump believes his own falsehoods. When then-Attorney General Pam Bondi shook down Minnesota Governor Tim Walz for the state’s voter rolls, was it to manipulate the upcoming midterms or to prove the fictitious 2020 bugbears? Hard to say. But either way, weird theories were at the heart of the matter.
It’s impossible to disentangle Trump’s deportation policy from the conspiracy theories that drive the president’s base. The right wing is awash in blatantly false claims that millions of undocumented people commit voter fraud. This makes sense because, surely, if you’re hiding in America, you want to risk it all to vote.
Actual evidence shows noncitizen voter fraud is basically nonexistent and functionally impossible. That hasn’t stopped Republicans from believing that millions of undocumented immigrants furtively hide from law enforcement and then blatantly cast ballots, risking all.
When Trump and Miller set high deportation quotas, is it because racism compels them? Most surveyed Americans say the administration’s immigration enforcement goes too far. Or is it because they believe removing the undocumented people ensures a Republican victory? When Steve Bannon calls on Trump to send ICE agents to polling stations this fall, is it voter suppression? We already know it could backfire on Republicans: As Bill Scher argued, “The number of energized and determined voters could easily outdo the number of intimidated voters.” Or is it a waste of resources in an attempt to stop what the Trumpsters see as existential “fraud”?
Even if some in the Trump administration are playing a long game to consolidate authority using backhanded maneuvers, the motivation for the most outrageous acts seems to stem a credulous belief in conspiracy theories.
The Trump administration’s machinations to retain power should spark concern and prompt countermeasures. But that worry should be tempered with a realization: MAGA is less a sophisticated corps of authoritarians than a collection of conspiracy-addled fools chasing crimes that were never committed in the first place.
