Let’s start with the proposition that you should not have to know who Andy Ogles is. It often seems like Andy Ogles doesn’t know who he really is, either. The second-term Republican congressman is a Middle Tennessee George Santos whose partial fabrication of his biography is mostly not compelling enough to summarize here, although I will say that it involves a doughnut shop, a non-existent local governing body, and a dubious proficiency in Russian. In Washington, Ogles does not seem to do much in the way of work. His animating purpose—in addition to staying out of prison—is to say things about President Donald Trump or the Democratic party that might produce a headline that features his words but not his name. But sometimes the things Republican congressmen say are a set-up for other, more important people, to say them too.
Last Friday, a few days after Zohran Mamdani all-but-clinched the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City, Ogles posted on X that the Democratic-Socialist state assemblyman—who was born in Uganda and received his US citizenship in 2018—should be denaturalized and deported on the basis of an old lyric from Mamdani’s rapping days that the congressman argued constituted material support for terrorism. (Like Ogles, I am neither a lawyer nor a “former member of law enforcement,” but: No.) Ogles’s comment was bigoted and insulting and also not how things work, but in the current moment, those are less disqualifiers than they are prerequisites. Citing the Ogles Memorandum, Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday if Trump believes the Department of Justice should begin the process of stripping Mamdani of his citizenship.
Leavitt gave what is by now the standard Leavitt answer: She couldn’t speak to the specifics, but if what Ogles was saying was true, it’s something the DOJ ought to be looking into.
It was the latest entry in a stunning wave of Islamophobic bigotry against Mamdani. Ogles called him “little Muhammad.” Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas) said that Mamdani should “go back to the third world” because he ate with his hands in one video. Fox News legal analyst Emily Compagno said she found it horrifying that Mamdani “won’t condemn the Holocaust”—something he has, in fact, condemned. A Republican on the New York City Council previously called for Mamdani to be removed from the country. The New York Young Republicans Club is selling t-shirts that say “Deport Zohran.” Charlie Kirk invoked the specter of 9/11 and said the US risked “cultural suicide.” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-New York), the likely Republican nominee for governor of New York, has repeatedly called Mamdani a “jihadist.” New York City Mayor Eric Adams has said Mamdani is “uplifting Hamas.”
Even by the standards of the Trump era, this talk of terrorism and denaturalization is despicable stuff—rank religious bigotry mixed with naked authoritarianism. It’s getting close to throwing-people-out-of-helicopters territory (which, to be clear, a Republican member of the New York City council has already shared a meme about doing). A White House official suggesting a political opponent might be stripped of their citizenship is unfathomable in a functioning democracy. Shouting that this is “authoritarian” does not quite do it justice; they are literally proposing to do to Mamdani what Idi Amin did to his father.
In the aftermath of Mamdani’s surprising victory, some members of his own party have seen the 33-year-old candidate as an inconvenience or a threat. Democrats have couched their criticisms of the candidate in the language of defending antisemitism, often citing Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada”—a term that Mamdani has not himself used. Like a game of telephone, the understanding of what Mamdani has actually said has sometimes lagged behind their sense that they should condemn it. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) said that he did not agree with Mamdani’s comments “about the Jewish people,” although Mamdani has not made disparaging comments about Jewish people. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) said on WNYC that she was “alarmed by past positions, specifically references to global jihad.” (Mamdani has not called for global jihad, and a Gillibrand spokesperson later said the senator had misspoke.)
With notable exceptions—such as Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-New York), the dean of the city’s congressional delegation, who endorsed Mamdani the day after the election—prominent Democrats have responded to the right-wing attacks on a Muslim officeholder with something a bit less tepid than full-throated solidarity. Meanwhile, the criticism of Mamdani on the right, purportedly because of an unspecified antisemitism, has produced its own kind of antisemitism. On Monday, in the midst of a segment accusing Mamdani of making life unsafe for Jews, Fox News host Harris Faulkner questioned Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s commitment to Judaism and said he “works against the interest of his own people.” Schumer is from Brooklyn; “his people” are New Yorkers.
Are Republicans all talk? Well, the Trump administration is trying to put a member of Congress in prison for making contact with an ICE officer during the baseless arrest of a mayor. It sent the vice president in front of the cameras to mistake a wrongfully-handcuffed Mexican-American US senator for a famous War on Terror detainee. It took a Green Card holder off the streets of New York City and tried to have him deported for criticizing another country’s foreign policy. The Trump administration is, according to NPR, rolling out an ambitious new denaturalization campaign aimed at bypassing due-process protections. And it is attempting to overrule the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment to strip babies of their citizenship—while pushing for a travel ban on much of the African continent (including Uganda). These things should all be DOA. But the story of the second Trump term is that it’s not a bluff when there’s no one willing to call it.
Democrats should be manning the barricades against this stuff, because the menace on the other side of the line is a far greater threat than a few negative advertisements in 2026. Attacking people’s citizenship and identity as punishment for their politics is a fascist move. It will destroy the country’s civic life if unchallenged. (Resist the temptation to cheer on Trump’s suggestion that he might do the same to Elon Musk; it is a poison for the soul.)
Beyond the corruption and the bad cologne, Trumpism has always been a story about who counts as American. The attacks on Mamdani—and the threat to strip him of his citizenship as punishment for his short-lived post-college career as Mr. Cardamom—reflect the rot at the heart of the modern GOP and the exclusionary definition of national identity that made Trump’s rise possible. The attack on an African-born Muslim is the logical continuation of a political movement that began with the racist lie that President Barack Obama was, in fact, an African-born Muslim. He and his ilk never stopped doing birtherism; it festered and festered until it controlled a state and legal apparatus that could render their fantasies into reality. And then it festered some more.
“A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said of Mamdani on Tuesday, at a press conference to announce the opening of a FEMA camp for immigrants in the Florida Everglades.
The fact that he wants this fight is all the more reason to have it. There has been an alarming lack of having-each-other’s-back during the first five-plus months of the new administration. Every successive threat has produced pleas to wait for the next one. High-profile Democrats have called, at various times, to make peace with the destruction of the United States Agency for International Development; the disappearance of immigrants to El Salvador; and the prospect of war with Iran. Senators do press tours to talk about the need for “alpha energy” after voting to confirm Kristi Noem. It’s incumbent upon them to stand united against this neo-birtherism, not because they agree with Mamdani on everything, but because if they punt on something so elemental people will start to question whether they believe in anything. They risk becoming a caricature of a caricature, a feckless party whose approach to fascism feels a lot like that old adage about grizzlies—you don’t have to run faster than the bear, you just have to run faster than your friends.
