LIKE him or loathe him, question his inconsistencies and his many other flaws, but in my view Donald Trump’s response to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant was spot on.
There was none of the pussyfooting ‘my thoughts are with . . .’ etc. Without equivocation, he immediately branded the shooting ‘an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror’, adding: ‘It was a crime against our entire nation.’
Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a tweet declaring: ‘President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals travelling on Afghan passports. The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.’
Attached was an official tweet from the Department of State making it clear that the ban was of immediate effect, with the Department ‘taking all necessary steps to protect US national security and public safety’.
This added to the ban in June when Trump imposed restrictions on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, but that ban did not revoke visas previously issued, and holders of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were exempt.
Now Trump has gone further. In a Thanksgiving message posted on X, he offered a salutation which, in Trumpian style, didn’t mince words. It started with: ‘A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the world, for being “politically correct”, and just plain STUPID, when it comes to immigration . . .’
That was only the start of a very long and quite extraordinary tweet which, if nothing else, can be criticised for a complete absence of paragraphs and sentences which rivalled in length those in a Dickens novel.
With his opening out of the way, Trump asserted that the official United States foreign population stands at 53million, most of whom, he averred, ‘are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels’.
‘They and their children,’ Trump continued, ‘are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape or form.’
Warming to his theme, he declared: ‘They put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 [£27,000] with a green card will get roughly $50,000 [£38,000] in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher.’
Pressing his point, he stated what none of Starmer’s motley crew will admit.
‘This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc),’ the Donald wrote.
In a passage which might have got him arrested had he posted in the UK, with refreshing candour, the President gave the example of ‘hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia’ who were ‘completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota’.
Somali gangs, he said, ‘are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone’.
No matter which country they end up in, Somalis tend to be bad news. There are multiple reports stretching back to 2007 of a plague of criminal gangs among the 32,000 Somalis who have settled in Minnesota.
Recently the Minnesota gangs have been associated with a series of massive welfare fraud schemes, the proceeds of which may have been funnelled to the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab.
The largest fraud scandal involving Somalis was the ‘Feeding Our Future’ scheme. Prosecutors racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they alleged was a plot to steal $300million (£270million) from a federally funded programme meant to feed children during the covid event.
It is also something of a national scandal that the police and the state prosecutor have been notoriously ineffective in dealing with the wave of immigrant crime, although the likes of the BBC revel in claims that Minneapolis police ‘engaged in pattern of racism’, especially in wake of the George Floyd affair.
Trump doesn’t hold back on such issues, launching into an attack on the ‘seriously retarded’ Democrat Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, whom he accuses of doing nothing, ‘either through fear, incompetence or both’.
Generous to a fault, though, the President shares his venom with what he calls ‘the worst congressman/woman in our country’ – the Mogadishu-born Ilhan Omar. ‘Always wrapped in her swaddling hijab,’ Trump notes, he repeats the (much-denied) accusation that she gained entry to the USA illegally by marrying her brother.
Most of all though, he complains that ‘she does nothing but hatefully complain about our country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime-ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of government, military, police, schools, etc’.
Turning his attention to immigration generally, Trump observes that ‘even as we have progressed technologically, immigration policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many’.
Then in a bombshell statement he declares: ‘I will permanently pause migration from all Third World countries to allow the US system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen.’
It doesn’t stop there. He promises to ‘remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country’.
He will, he says, ‘end all federal benefits and subsidies to non-citizens of our country, denaturalise migrants who undermine domestic tranquillity, and deport any foreign national who are a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western civilisation’.
These goals, he says, will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorised and illegal ‘Autopen’ approval process, declaring: ‘Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.’
This is remigration by any other name, making Trump the first Western leader to put this policy firmly on the agenda. And, with that, he wished ‘HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL’, adding: ‘Except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for’, with the menacing rider: ‘You won’t be here for long!’
The usual suspects have attacked what they are calling Trump’s ‘rant’, and even the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal – labelled ‘conservative’ – has said that Afghan nationals ‘shouldn’t be blamed for the violent act of one man’. Collective punishment of all Afghans in the US, it says, ‘won’t make America safer and it might embitter more against the United States’.
Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, to whom the anti-immigration policy is attributed, had his own response.
‘This is the great lie of mass migration,’ he said. ‘You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.’
Those who are aware of the depredation of Third World imports on British society can only look upon this exchange in awe, and with a tinge of jealousy, yearning for that sort of robust response from British politicians – the sort that will never come.
This article appeared in Turbulent Times on November 29, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
