Rebranding

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With $175 billion headed to ICE, Trump is building his own police force. One that enjoys playing outside the lines of morality, ethics, and the law. Rebranding imagines the next logical step: expanding ICE’s authority to enforce not just immigration and customs, but citizenship as well. As I noted in a previous strip, Vance is already defining what it is to be an American. Meanwhile, Trump is seeking to do away with birthright citizenship, perhaps retroactively. Which makes Rebranding less absurd satire and more a satirical cautionary tale.

I hesitated to include the Gestapo gag. Using Nazi references is often gratuitous and can undermine the intended message. But the only alternative I could think of was Stasi, the East German internal police during the Cold War when there was an East Germany. And that was so obscure I needed to look it up to confirm I had the right name. For better or worse, just as Google is now a synonym for online search, Gestapo is the generic name for ideologically driven, cruel, and dangerous national police forces. ICE seems intent on displacing the Gestapo as a generic term, but they’re not quite there—yet.

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