At a Trump rally in Michigan on Sunday, David Beamer, the father of a passenger who died on the hijacked United Flight 93 on 9/11, made a remarkable criticism of Democratic senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
“Mike Rogers is an American,” Beamer said of El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, as President Donald Trump looked on. “Abdul has a birth certificate. The birth certificate says he’s a citizen of America. You know what? A birth certificate doesn’t make you an American.”
Dismissing a birth certificate as legitimate evidence of nationality underscores the egregious bigotry of the GOP’s racist playbook against El-Sayed. And it illuminates an evolution in the right’s tactics toward a postbirtherism white nationalism.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, Trump played a key role in popularizing racist “birtherism” conspiracy theories that sought to undermine Obama’s legitimacy as president by claiming he was not born in the U.S. One right-wing activist titled a book promoting those theories “Where’s The Birth Certificate?” Those narratives prompted Obama to release a long-form birth certificate to the public in 2011 — after having released a standard one in 2008 in response to earlier sets of rumors.
The right wants to become an arbiter of who gets to be an American, using its own political and racial metrics.
That wasn’t enough for Trump. In 2012 he tweeted, “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” He and many on the right questioned the authenticity of the certificate several other times. Years later, however, he claimed he was the one who had “finished” the manufactured controversy.
Trump’s questioning of Obama’s Americanness was, undoubtedly, animated by rank bigotry. But ostensibly that disinformation campaign had a solution — an authentic certificate. Implicitly, it acknowledged the constitutional rights conferred by being born in the U.S.
Now things have gotten far worse: Having a birth certificate is not enough. Being a citizen is not enough. Having the backing of the Constitution is not enough. Instead, the right wants to become an arbiter of who gets to be an American, using its own political and racial metrics.
“[El-Sayed] demonstrates with his view of what our world should look like that he’s not an American, he’s anti-American,” Beamer said at the rally. How did he determine this? Beamer claimed, falsely, that El-Sayed’s beliefs “align” with the Islamist organization the Muslim Brotherhood. This is a fabricated claim. It takes El-Sayed’s Arab ancestry as a pretext for claiming he has covert extremist beliefs. For right-wingers, the “proof” is El-Sayed’s background.
“He has blood that’s red,” Beamer said. “However, he has chosen to remove any strain of the white and blue part in his blood. We cannot allow this man to invade and occupy our country.”
Given that white in the U.S. flag symbolizes, according to the U.S. government, “purity and innocence” and blue symbolizes “vigilance, perseverance, and justice,” it’s not hard to see how Beamer’s remarks code as a comment on El-Sayed being innately too swarthy and too dangerous for Michigan. Thus, his potential election becomes an “invasion.” In an echo of the fascistic language of the 20th century, the right’s case against the people they want to Other is rendered in terms of protection of the body.
Beamer’s virulent rhetoric is in keeping with that of the party. At the same rally, Trump smeared El-Sayed as a “jihadist” — a lie he has repeatedly uttered. Rogers’ first attack ad against El-Sayed attempted to portray left-wing politicians of color as violent anarchists.
The shameful comments of Trump, Rogers, Beamer and others are not an outlier limited to one Senate race, but a summary of the right’s trajectory. This is all of a piece with the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back birthright citizenship and effectively permit immigration based on race. Vice President JD Vance has promoted the idea that ethnic heritage, not shared values, make one an American. This project, under the guise of protecting America from a so-called invasion, is a bid to create nothing less than a white ethnostate.
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