With an incredible number of important things going on in Washington and around the world, the Trump White House is focused on base-pondering nonsense, as I noted at New York. It’s important for Democrats to understand what that means.

While Donald Trump is highly erratic, you can always rely on him pandering to his MAGA base on immigration-related issues. So it’s no surprise that the defeat in the U.S. Supreme Court of his bid to end birthright citizenship didn’t deter him from coming right back to the well on the subject. On Thursday he signed two new executive orders purporting to address abuses in the current immigration system. While his 2025 EO flatly repudiating the automatic right to citizenship of those born in the United States was struck down by the Supreme Court in the Trump v. Barbara decision on June 30, the new orders appear to nibble around the edges of the issue, as the Associated Press explains:

“[The first order]  was narrower in scope than the previous one shot down by the Supreme Court and appeared to focus on restricting automatic citizenship to specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organizations as well as anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.

“It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents ‘engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.’

“A second order seeks to curb what Trump called ‘birth tourism’ by increasing restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.”

The number of people ostensibly affected by these orders is pretty limited, notes the Washington Post:

“The new orders were certain to face legal challenges, and if they survive, would affect far fewer people than the original. An estimated 15 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., while only a few thousand people are foreign lobbyists registered with the Justice Department.

“No significant populations of U.S. residents are designated as alien enemies or foreign terrorists, making that provision largely symbolic. The administration faces ongoing litigation over whether it can deport alleged gang members by treating them as alien enemies. …

“There is no official data on ‘birth tourism.’ In 2024, fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses, out of 3.6 million total live births, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.”

When Trump announced the new orders Stephen Miller was on hand to offer some demagogic thoughts about “birth tourism,” a concept that fits in well with the presidential aide’s notorious subscription to conspiracy theories about immigrant efforts to rob American blind while rigging elections, as the BBC reported:

“’The idea (is) that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor,’ Stephen Miller, homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said while standing beside the president on Thursday.

“’But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, (to) leave our country and then have a US citizen child,’ he said, adding that those children then gain access to welfare benefits, the voting booth, and ‘all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.'”

While it’s unlikely these orders will ever be successfully enforced, they serve as a pre-midterms reminder to MAGA voters–and everyone else–that the administration hasn’t given up on radically restricting legal immigration even as it carries out the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. It’s as close to the core of Trump’s message and agenda as his related claims that Democrats are regularly stealing elections by deploying the many millions of swarthy illegal voters they’ve lured across the borders by promises of welfare payments and encouragement to commit crimes. Mere Supreme Court decisions won’t stop Trump and Miller from hammering away at this lurid and divisive theme.