Elon Musk’s “illegal” past doesn’t feel like hypocrisy to MAGA — Trump’s hate rally in NYC shows why

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Tesla CEO and Donald Trump super-fan Elon Musk was once, to use the term favored by MAGA, an “illegal.” Which is to say, he did what the vast majority of undocumented immigrants do in the U.S. After he traveled here legally, he overstayed a visa and then worked without the legal authorization to do so. Investors were so worried the South African native would be deported that they even stipulated that he obtain legal status in their contracts, creating a paper trail proving his “illegal” status. As for why readers should care, the Post reporters offered a “hypocrisy” frame, noting, “Musk in recent months has amplified the Republican presidential candidate’s claims that ‘open borders’ and undocumented immigrants are destroying America.”

The MAGA world shrugged, but not because they are especially talented at managing cognitive dissonance. No, they don’t see this story as evidence of hypocrisy. I generally loathe semantic debates, but this one matters. The Post reporters assume, incorrectly, that when Musk, Trump and their allies are ranting about “illegals,” they mean immigrants who don’t have proper documentation to live and work in the U.S. But if you pay attention to how the word is used in context, it’s clear Musk and company use “illegals” as a catch-all category for all non-white immigrants, and, increasingly, any native-born American citizen whose skin color or ethnic heritage MAGA dislikes. To MAGA, an undocumented white immigrant is fine. But a legal immigrant with darker skin — or even a native-born citizen — is an “illegal.” 

A scan of Musk’s relentless tweets on this front illustrates this. A recent middle-of-the-night tweet from Musk screeched about “the magnitude of the illegal voter importation program under Biden-Harris.” President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are not “importing” anyone. Other tweets show Musk is alluding to immigrants, most of whom aren’t white, who are entering under international asylum laws, which means they have a legal right to be here. This isn’t “importing” immigrants, but a government program allowing those with a pre-existing desire to relocate to do so legally. By definition, it’s legal. 

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Nor is Musk alone. Most of the time, when MAGA leaders say “illegals” or “illegal immigrants,” they are demonizing legal immigrants. When Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, pushed a lie that Haitian immigrants steal and eat people’s pets, they weren’t just lying about their behavior. They characterized them as “illegal,” even though these folks are part of a government program allowing them to live and work in the U.S. When Vance was corrected during the vice presidential debate by moderator Margaret Brennan, who told viewers the Haitians in question have legal status, Vance whined “You guys weren’t going to fact-check” so obnoxiously they cut his microphone. 

But in case there was any doubt the “immigration” issue is about MAGA racism and not immigration, it was wiped away by the speakers at Sunday night’s Trump rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The comment that got the most press attention was from “comedian” Tony Hinchcliffe, who rolled out a series of racist jokes. Specifically, he called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” which no one mistook for being a comment about the famous vacation spot’s natural beauty. 

The comment got the lion’s share of media attention because it came early in the evening, drew rebukes from influential Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny, and — most crucially for the horse race-focused media — because Puerto Ricans living in the 50 states have a right to vote in the presidential election. But what may be even more important is that, by going after a group of native-born citizens, Hinchcliffe gave the MAGA game away. This isn’t and never was about “immigration,” legal or otherwise. Puerto Ricans aren’t immigrants, but natural-born citizens, with the same legal status as any random white guy in a diner in Iowa. 

The Trump campaign issued a mealy-mouthed comment saying the “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump,” but it was quickly verified that the joke had been loaded into the teleprompter. The campaign knew full well what Hinchcliffe was going to say and only scrambled when reminded how many Puerto Ricans vote in swing states. But it’s self-evident that the campaign spokesperson lied because she didn’t disavow any of the many other racist jokes Hinchcliffe told, such as a tired joke about Black people and watermelon and another complaining about Latinos having babies. The “humor” at a 2024 MAGA rally comes right out of cartoons in 50s-era KKK pamphlets. 

Nor was Hinchcliffe alone. The entire rally was built on rhetoric aimed directly at denying the legitimacy of native-born Americans, often in grossly racist terms. Right-wing “influencer” Grant Cardone accused Harris of having “pimp handlers” and said, of Democratic voters, “We need to slaughter these people.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson described Harris, who was born a U.S. citizen in California, as a “Samoan-Malaysian, low IQ former California prosecutor.” That “Low IQ” claim is a favorite, unsubtle dog whistle Trump often applies to Black people, following his lifelong obsession with the racist pseudoscience of eugenics. Carlson’s “joke” about Harris, who he knows full well has a Jamaican father and Indian mother, is just a trollish way of saying all non-white people are the same — and that none of them are real Americans. By the time Trump speechwriter Stephen Miller took the stage to declare, “America is for Americans and Americans only,” there was no remaining doubt that “American” only means “white people” in the MAGA world. 

Trump’s speech made it clear, as well, that the expanding circle of people whose Americanness he denies now includes white people who oppose him, or even just dare tell the truth on occasion about him. His now-catchphrase of “enemies within” had already grown to encompass Democratic elected officials and journalists. On Sunday, he declared it covered an “amorphous group of people” which Biden and Harris are mere “vessels” for. It’s a sinister recasting of the system where people vote for leaders who then represent their interests, i.e. democracy. While some pundits hand-wring over whether it “insults” Trump voters to call him a fascist, the fascist leader of the GOP just declared the majority of American voters — over 81 million people — to be un-American “enemies from within.” 

The heat of MAGA rhetoric has turned red-hot, but this idea that the only “real” Americans are people who look, act, and vote like them was baked into Trumpism from before he even ran for the Republican nomination the first time. Trump first started to make national political news by championing the “birther” conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama. At the time, the press took this conspiracy theory literally, as if it represented real confusion among Republicans about whether Obama was a natural-born citizen. Now it’s obvious that, like most right-wing conspiracy theories, it’s more symbolic, a way to say someone like Obama — Black, liberal, cosmopolitan — cannot be a “real” American. The Big Lie, predicated on the idea that voters in racially diverse cities are “fraud,” is more of the same. Republicans know the residents of Detroit, Philadelphia, and Atlanta are legal voters, but they feel they shouldn’t be. 

And so it goes with the term “illegal.” The press is unwise to take it as a literal description of an immigrant who is living and working without proper documentation. Such a term would apply to Musk in the past, but not to the Haitian immigrants that Vance and Trump have defamed. When MAGA says “illegal,” however, they mean anyone they don’t think should be allowed to call themselves “American.” Coupled with “enemies within,” it’s clear that it’s an ever-broadening category of non-white immigrants, native-born people of color and, increasingly, white liberals. It’s like the Nazi term “undesirables” in the breadth of its scope. Which is why it’s not a coincidence that Sunday’s rally looked so much like the 1939 Nazi rally in the same location.