How The Trump Administration And MAGA America Turned ‘Third World’ Into A Racial Slur

If there’s one thing MAGA America has been good for, it’s creating new racial slurs.

Oh, they’re not creating new words or anything like that; they’re just taking existing language and doing their favorite thing with it: making it racist. For example, “illegal” was already an existing word, but it didn’t become a slur until white conservatives made it plural, referring to human beings — typically Black and Hispanic human beings — as “illegals,” and they have shown over and over again that they’ll call non-white migrants by this slur whether they’re in the U.S. legally or not.

Of course, diversity, equity and inclusion, on their faces, are positive words that denote progress for marginalized demographics, but ever since the Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme court effectively struck down affirmative action, paving the way for white America to ramp up its anti-DEI movement, white conservatives have been slinging around the term “DEI hire” at every Black person they see in any position of power, including elected officials. “DEI hire” has become the white conservative go-to whenever a Black person with authority makes a public mistake, or whenever there’s some disaster on their watch that they couldn’t have possibly prevented.

Meanwhile, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth can share war plans on Signal chats, Education Secretary Linda McMahon can confuse a brand of steak sauce with the initials “AI,” and fail to know basic history, and President Donald Trump can fill his Cabinet with other white people who are demonstrably unqualified for the positions they hold — and you can bet that the words “DEI hire” will never be part of the discussion, even during criticism.

Now, the Trump administration has made a new racial slur out of a long-existing term: “third world.”

We saw the start of it weeks ago, when Trump responded to the shooting of two National Guard members he deployed to Washington, D.C., illegally by flying off into an irrelevant rant about how he doesn’t want Somalis, Afghans or any other “Third-World country” refugees in the U.S. And we know he was specifically talking about Black and brown refugees, because, by his own definition, South Africa would be a third world nation, yet he’s welcoming white Afrikaners and only white Afrikaners with open arms. (Well, except for the idiots who think they can fly right over without going through the proper channels for asylum claims.)

We saw it again when White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller spent his holiday dreaming of a white nationalist Christmas, posting tweet after tweet about how America never “needed infinity migrants from the third world.”

And now, the Department of Homeland Security has gotten in on the Klan-coded act.

From AlterNet:

On Wednesday, the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a piece of artwork depicting a pink late-1960s Cadillac Eldorado parked on a bright, idyllic beach. Over the clear blue sky are the words “America after 100 million deportations. The post was captioned by the agency: “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.”

Social media users later discovered that DHS had, ironically, stolen the image from the Japanese pop artist Hiroshi Nagai without giving credit.

It is hardly the first time the administration has used edgy and inflammatory social media posts to promote its agenda. But DHS has come under particular scrutiny for its style of communication, which often evokes white nationalist rhetoric and symbolism.

Posts by the agency have cheered “remigration,” a term that far-right parties in Europe have often used to describe the forced repatriation of nonwhite populations, including citizens. Other posts have referred to President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” campaign as part of an effort to defend American “heritage” and “culture.”

The agency frequently evokes images of the American frontier and references “Manifest Destiny,” at times explicitly posting artwork glorifying the forced displacement of Native American populations.

An image by the agency, featuring a chiseled Uncle Sam calling on Americans to “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS,” was even directly sourced from an overt neo-Nazi account.

The agency has only continued to double down in the face of criticism this week. On Friday, it posted that “2026 will be the year of American Supremacy” over an image of then-Gen. George Washington crossing the Delaware River, which was emblazoned with the words “Return this Land,” a possible reference to a recently-founded “whites-only” town in rural Arkansas known as “Return to the Land.”

MAGA supporters get their Klan-derwear all in a bunch whenever we generalize Republicans, the Trump administration, and other assorted Trump supporters as white supremacists, but they keep providing us with a bottomless open bar of citations to back up the assertion that white supremacists are exactly what they are.

They can switch up the language all they want, but we still know racial slurs and racist narratives when we hear them. And that’s exactly why we have also always known what is really meant by “Make America great again.”

SEE ALSO:

Trump Immigration Ploy Is A Return To Racial Control Policies

Stephen Miller Dreams Of A White Nationalist Christmas