If Youre Not Orange, Youre a Target

I heard it on LBC, and I nearly spat my tea out.

Sadiq Khan was having another pop at Trump and said something along the lines of: if your skin colour is different to President Trump’s, you might feel nervous about “a tap on the shoulder” from the authorities.

Now, I get what he meant. Under Trump, plenty of non-white people and immigrants feel more exposed. The rhetoric shifts, the enforcement gets nastier, and suddenly the state feels less like a referee and more like a bouncer with a grudge.

But “different to Trump’s skin colour” is a magnificent choice of words, because Trump’s skin colour isn’t even the same as most white people. He’s not a reference point for whiteness. He’s a reference point for whatever happens when you let a man marinate in fake tan for forty years and then put him under studio lighting.

So you end up with the accidental truth hiding inside the joke: if you’re not orange, you’re a target.

Not literally, obviously. ICE aren’t wandering about with a colour chart like they’re choosing tiles for a bathroom. But politically, that’s what Trumpism does. It draws a circle round “people like him”, then treats everyone else as suspicious, expendable, or useful as a warning to the rest. It’s not really about legality, it’s about hierarchy.

And that’s the bit people miss when they try to sanitise it as “just enforcing the rules”. When enforcement becomes theatre, it stops being precise. It becomes a performance of power. It sweeps wider than it needs to, it makes mistakes, and it creates fear as a feature, not a bug.

So yes, laugh at Khan’s line. You should. It’s genuinely funny. But it also lands, by accident, on the reality: Trump’s politics isn’t a careful system of law. It’s a loyalty test with uniforms.

And somehow, in all this, it’s never the orange bloke who gets the tap on the shoulder.