The Worse Angels

Trump didn't invent America's darkest impulses. He just helped millions of Americans feel they no longer had to hide them.

Barbara is not her real name.

We do not know her real name, and that fact belongs at the beginning of this story.

“Barbara” is a pregnant mother who sued the President of the United States, using a pseudonym. She was asking the Supreme Court to keep the promise our country made to her unborn child, and she was afraid of what her neighbors might do to her family if they knew.

Here is what we do know. She fled Honduras with her husband and three children, running from the Mara 18 gang, and has been living in New Hampshire since 2024, seeking asylum. In February 2025, she learned she was pregnant—just a few weeks after President Trump signed an executive order declaring that her baby, though born on American soil, would be no American.

As the litigation proceeded, nature took its course. Last October, the baby was born, on American soil. And that is the child whom—along with so many others—our government went all the way to the Supreme Court to unmake as an American.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court refused to strip this child of US citizenship, and so reaffirmed the idea so plainly stated in the Fourteenth Amendment: Every child born here is one of us. The only exceptions are the ones that were established in 1866, when the Amendment was passed—children of foreign diplomats and of invading foreign military forces. The vote was 6 to 3 (though the principle of birthright citizenship under the Constitution was upheld by a vote of only 5-4.)

What struck me about about the Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion for the Court is how quiet it is. There is no trumpet blast about the US being a nation of immigrants, no Emma Lazarus. It is all common law and the debates of 1866, Wong Kim Ark and the careful weighing of the Trump administration’s theory that only children of those immigrants who are properly “domiciled” in the US (as Trump’s executive order defines that term) are citizens if they are born here.

The Chief Justice closes his opinion for the Court by calling birthright citizenship a promise the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment made to every child born on American soil. “We keep that promise today,” he writes.

That’s it. And maybe Roberts is making a point with the modesty of his language.

For a century and more, this ruling would have been seen as totally normal—mainstream—unobjectionable to the vast majority of legal scholars, political leaders, and ordinary citizens of both parties.

Birthright citizenship was settled law in the deepest sense; settled not just in the casebooks but in the country’s understanding of itself.

I thought the case should have come out 9–0. Instead, there were three dissents, tendentious and radical, and a fourth justice who grudgingly joined the result but not the constitutional principle, encouraging a MAGA Congress and president to pass a law and try again.

So times have changed. For the worse.

Ask yourself honestly: fifteen years ago, would this case have been close at all?

Then came the reaction to Barbara’s victory in the Supreme Court. Incandescent rage.

Representative Troy Nehls of Texas proposed a ten-year moratorium on all immigration, declaring: “You have to love our country. We gotta put a bedsheet—a big bedsheet—over the Statue of Liberty…She gotta go to sleep for a while. I’m not saying she’s dead. Instead of having a torch, maybe she needs a stop sign.”

Matt Walsh, far-right provocateur, publicly confessed a hatred for the justices in the majority—and all who agree with the ruling—simply because they affirm the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, accepted for generations:

Stephen Miller, the President’s chief domestic policy adviser, reacted with his customary hatefulness and fascist rhetoric. He called the ruling “a deep knife-wound in the heart of the American republic,’“ and went on to show the depths of his bigotry and his own weird insecurities, screeching about the idea that a baby born here to immigrant parents “can sit on a jury when he turns 18 and sit in judgment of you, and sit in judgment of me!”

And then there was the editor of a prominent conservative publication who looked forward, offering his ideas to undo what the Court had done. He included, without irony, the forced sterilization of foreign visitors—a proposal that international law classifies, plainly, as a crime against humanity. This man remains employed. He will suffer no consequence at all.

Trump did not make these people this way.

I don’t believe that. The truth is worse, and that’s the terrible lesson of this moment.

In the summer of 2016, a team of researchers offered people in reliably Republican states a small amount of money to authorize a donation to a fiercely anti-immigrant organization. Half were promised anonymity; half were told a researcher might learn of their choice and follow up with them.

Before the election, that little difference mattered enormously. It turns out that some people would take the deal—support that organization in secret—but not make that choice if there was a possibility it would come to light.

Then Trump won, and the researchers ran the experiment again. The gap had vanished. Same people. Same money. Same organization. The only thing that had changed in those few weeks was what they believed their neighbors would think of them.

For a long time, I have thought that Donald Trump’s true gift as a demagogue, a kind of genius, is that through his personality, rhetoric, and carnivorous instinct for the dark viscera of his audience, he creates a permission structure. He does not put hatred into people. Rather, he convinces millions of Americans that the shameful thing they carry (we all carry shameful things, since Eden) is not shameful—that the neighbors carry it too, that the mask was only ever a burden, that cruelty can be fun and funny and free. He grants permission—permission to become the worst version of yourself. It’s intoxicating.

And permission, when indulged for long enough, stops being permission and becomes character.

Abraham Lincoln, in the last sentence of his First Inaugural, famously appealed to “the better angels of our nature.’” With rebellion (grounded in racism) already primed and loaded and aimed, Lincoln still believed those “mystic chords of memory” would swell the chorus of union when touched.

Donald Trump’s discovery is that the worse angels of our nature answer to touch as well, and faster.

But we have been here before.

The 1920s gave us the Ku Klux Klan reborn and the Golden Door of immigration slammed shut on explicitly racial lines. It felt permanent, but it was not. What was granted as permission was, eventually, revoked—and not by courts alone but by Americans who decided, one conscience at a time, to be kind to the stranger, to care for him, to invite him in. And to be ashamed again of succumbing to the temptations of racism and cruelty.

The old American ideal was never that we were exceptionally virtuous. We weren’t. We have always been capable of prejudice, selfishness, cruelty, and fear. Our aspiration was different. It was that, despite our failings, we should try to become better than the worst version of ourselves. And thus establish a free and decent society.

Barbara is a citizen of the United States. The Court kept the promise. The harder promise—the one about who we are willing to be, in public, in our shared civic life—is not Court’s to keep. It never was.

—Terry