Who Gets to Belong? Señor TACO Is Trying To Bring Back The Unperson

So Now We Have The Politics Of Belonging & The Cruelty of Banishment?

In the mid-1970s, I was living and working in what you might call a hippie commune— an improvised family made up of people from all over the world who had washed up in Amsterdam, looking for something freer and more humane. But the two authority figures who ran it ruled like petty despots. From time to time, they would banish someone from the family— not for theft or violence, but for questioning decisions or clashing with their egos. These weren’t strangers they were expelling. These were friends— family, really. Each expulsion was a gut-punch that sent the rest of us into fits of despair, depression and helplessness. Eventually, we’d had enough. We rose up, banished the banishers, and democratized the commune.

Somewhat earlier and a bit to the south, in ancient Athens, birthplace of democracy, there was a mechanism by which citizens professed to protect the state from those deemed too dangerous or too powerful: ostracism. Once a year, Athenians could vote to exile a fellow citizen for a decade— not for a crime, but for being a perceived threat to the stability of the polis… no trial, no defense— just a vote scratched on shards of pottery. It was a legal form of political banishment that wrapped authoritarian instincts in democratic ritual. Among its victims were war heroes like Themistocles and reformers like Aristides— men who had served Athens well but fell afoul of popular sentiment or political rivals. In another Athenian practice, atimia, individuals could be stripped of civic rights entirely, reduced to a state of dishonor where they could no longer vote, speak in public, or defend themselves in court.

The message was clear: membership in the civic community was conditional. It could be revoked not just for breaking laws, but for challenging power. These were ancient tools to marginalize dissent, enforce loyalty, and protect oligarchic interests under the veneer of public consensus. They were also warnings— both to those who would defy power and to the rest of the population about the consequences of stepping out of line.

Rome, too, had its ways of dealing with those who displeased those in power. During the late Republic and into the Empire, exile became a favored weapon against political opponents. The orator Cicero was driven from the city for executing conspirators without trial. Later, during the chaotic years of civil war and consolidation, emperors like Sulla and Augustus compiled proscription lists— names of senators, generals, and citizens marked for execution or banishment. Their property was seized, their names struck from civic records, their families sometimes targeted as well. Under emperors like Tiberius, Domitian, and Nero, exile or worse became a fate reserved for outspoken senators, historians, and poets—anyone whose words cut too close to the truth. 

Rome also practiced damnatio memoriae— the literal erasure of a disgraced person’s name and image from public life. Statues were smashed, inscriptions chiseled off, records burned. It was not enough to punish someone physically; they had to be symbolically unpersoned, as though they never belonged to Rome at all. In both Greece and Rome, the ruler’s message was unmistakable: opposition is betrayal, and betrayal severs you from the body politic.

While the American experiment was founded on Enlightenment ideals of inalienable rights and equality under the law, it has never been immune to the same authoritarian impulse to treat citizenship as a privilege for the loyal rather than a right for all. In the early 20th century, during the First Red Scare, the U.S. government targeted anarchists, labor organizers and left-wing immigrants for surveillance, arrest, loss of citizenship and deportation. The most famous case was that of anarchist Emma Goldman, a fierce critic of capitalism and war, who had become a U.S. citizen through marriage. In 1908, her citizenship was retroactively voided when her ex-husband was declared ineligible for naturalization, and in 1919 she was deported during the Palmer Raids— a mass roundup of radicals orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

Her crime wasn’t violence or espionage— it was speech. Goldman had opposed World War I and championed labor rights, feminism and birth control. For that, she was labeled a threat to national security and stripped of her membership in the American political community. In that moment, as in ancient Athens or imperial Rome, citizenship became a weapon, wielded not in defense of democracy but against it. And where was Woodrow Wilson? He had signed the Immigration Act of 1918 (AKA- the Anarchist Exclusion Act). Goldman, Alexander Berkman and 247 others were deported to Soviet Russia in December 1919 aboard the ship USS Buford, dubbed the “Soviet Ark” by the corporate press.

Later, during the McCarthy era, the U.S. again flirted with this logic. While full denaturalizations were rare and often blocked by the courts, the government attempted to silence dissenting voices— especially among immigrants— through passport revocations, blacklists, and threats of deportation. Figures like Paul Robeson, a celebrated actor and civil rights activist, were not stripped of citizenship, but were effectively exiled by being denied the ability to travel. The implication was clear: certain ideas made you less American. Certain allegiances— like loyalty to labor, to peace, or to racial justice— put your status in question.

This is the tradition Donald Trump tapped into— whether knowingly or, much more likely, instinctively— when he publicly fantasized yesterday about stripping Rosie O'Donnell of her citizenship. His language isn’t the language of law or democratic disagreement; it’s the language of exile, of damnatio, of political purification. Like many of us, she had the audacity to call him “insane.” In Trump’s world, disagreement is treason, and treason is disqualifying. His statement may read as a petty tantrum, but it’s far more sinister than that: it’s the fantasy of an autocrat who believes the state is an extension of himself— and that those who oppose him are no longer part of the nation.

This is not the first time Trump has flirted with this kind of rhetoric. He has called for the deportation of American-born citizens, proposed revoking birthright citizenship, and routinely suggests that political opponents “hate America” and don’t belong here. But the post about Rosie O'Donnell is particularly chilling because it strips away the usual fig leaves of national security or immigration enforcement. There is no policy rationale— just personal vengeance. She insulted him, so she should be erased.

To suggest that citizenship is contingent upon personal loyalty to a leader is the hallmark of authoritarian rule. Whether in ancient Athens or McCarthy-era America, it has always been the tactic of the insecure despot— not the confident democrat. The danger isn’t just that Trump is joking about it; it’s that he’s planting the idea, again, that some people don’t deserve to belong— especially if they speak out. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that when leaders start deciding who counts as a citizen based on allegiance, it’s never where the purge ends. It’s only where it begins.

“Trump’s threat to a comedian he’s long despised,” wrote Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng, “is not happening in a vacuum, in the same way that his threat to criminally investigate  Bruce Springsteen, because the rock star said something Trump didn’t like, comes as Trump’s government is, in fact, criminally investigating Trump’s enemies only because they made the president mad. These are all different words in the same sentence in the exact same authoritarian tome… Trump has recently suggested he could attempt to denaturalize Zohran Mamdani… who was born in Uganda, came to the U.S. as a child and has been a naturalized citizen in 2018. ‘A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,’ Trump claimed. ‘We’re going to look at everything.’ It’s worth noting that Trump’s wife, Melania, is a naturalized citizen. She gained her U.S. citizenship after they were married. While Trump is leading a sweeping effort to arrest, jail, and deport immigrants, the president does not believe that citizenship, in and of itself, should automatically protect Americans from being given the same brutal treatment he prescribes for noncitizens. For instance, Trump has publicly said he wants to ship certain Americans overseas and jail them abroad.”

George Orwell warned that authoritarianism begins not with mass arrests or censorship, but with the slow corrosion of language and truth. In 1984, those who defied the regime didn’t just disappear— they became “unpersons,” erased from public memory, history, and identity. What Trump proposed in his post isn’t just a punitive measure against a critic— it’s a flirtation with unpersoning. In suggesting that dissent voids citizenship, he is toying with the ultimate Orwellian inversion: that loyalty to power defines belonging, and truth is whatever the leader says it is. It's not just a threat to one individual— it’s a threat to the very concept of citizenship as a right, of nationhood as something larger than one man’s ego. In a functioning democracy, the president answers to the citizens. In Trump’s imagination, it’s the other way around.