Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Brian Beutler: It’s good to be with you.
Beutler: I think Stephen Miller is certainly happy with the ruling. I think Trump’s views on immigration enforcement will probably follow public opinion a little bit more closely, and he’ll figure out a way to back away from his most extreme policies if the slide in public opinion continues. But he’ll do it in a way where he characterizes it as some sort of victory—that his heavy-handed policies won the immigration wars—until the next time he needs to do it again. He’s much more a finger in the wind than the strictest ideologues who work underneath him.
Harry Enten (audio voiceover): Where are we? Well, I think we can say that Donald Trump has lost a political battle when it comes to what has happened out in Los Angeles. Donald Trump’s net approval rating on the Los Angeles process—look at this—overall way way way underwater at minus 15 points. How about among independents or those who don’t identify with either major party? Way, even lower—look at that—minus 24 points on the net approval rating. And of course, this is happening on what should be one of Donald Trump’s … in fact, the best issue for Donald Trump: immigration. And yet when it comes to these Los Angeles protests, 15 points underwater overall and 24 points underwater among independents. No good.
Beutler: When Donald Trump was president the first time, he took actions with respect to immigrants that blew back against him and then he had to back down. And then he lost the 2020 election. And in the post-acute Covid phase of the pandemic, there [were] major flows of immigrants north across the southern border, and public opinion swung in the other direction—aided in large part by Republican propaganda—about what was happening at the border, which helped Trump become president again. But he’s settling back into the kinds of enforcement actions and deportation actions that are likely to cause the same exact blowback he faced in his first term. And you can see that happening.
Sargent: Yes. Brian, I think what you’re saying politely is that a lot of those pundits who are telling Democrats to get off the issue of immigration are full of shit. On other issues, they recognize the thermostatic nature of public opinion—but then when it happens on immigration, they just pretend not to notice.
Sargent: Don’t remind me, Brian.
Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t agree more. So data analyst G. Elliott Morris looked at a number of polls and found, again, that the public tilts against Trump’s handling of the L.A. protests. And at the same time, he found Trump’s general approval on immigration has dropped into the negative. I think what we’re seeing clearly here is that things that break through the noise and focus people’s attention can move the public against Trump generally. This, again, is another thing that is lost on Democrats generally and on, I think, that certain type of pundit we’re talking about here.
And I think it’s misguided both because it’s uncanny, but also because if you just lean into it and make Trump overreach, it erodes his standing both on what he perceives to be his strongest issue [and] generally. If his immigration polling is falling below water as it appears to be, that’s a sign that he is becoming less popular overall. And that’s good if you’re trying to stop him from cutting health care, you know? There’s no contradiction. It’s not that if you try to expose more people to how bad his immigration policies are, you’re letting health care sneak through. I think you are making people distrustful of him across the board, across issues, and it’s going to make members of Congress a little more reluctant to throw their hat in with him on health care as well.
Beutler: Absolutely. In the exact same way that Trump can have his highest approval numbers on immigration because people perceive him to be more interested in reducing net immigration and net illegal immigration in the United States but horribly unpopular in the particulars because he goes about it in this Gestapo-like way.… The same exact thing works on the level of issue salience where Trump and some of these pundits seem to be falling into the same trap of thinking, Well, this is his best issue, so he wants it to be salient and people who oppose him don’t want it to be salient. But if he makes it salient and then turns off half the country or offends half the country or more than half the country by proving that his real handling of immigration is cruel and something that most people don’t like, that can’t be good for him.
Beutler: I think Democrats have lost almost all of their confidence in their ability to win an argument. Because for the last several years, Trump has outpolled them on immigration, because views that were pretty mainstream among Democrats fell into disfavor during the Biden years, [Democrats think] that if [they] raised their voice at all to say anything of substance about Trump’s immigration policies, voters will hear what they say and recoil in horror. Even just in the last five months of this term of Trump’s second presidency, that doesn’t seem to be happening. When Democrats engage on the immigration issue, it seems to hurt Trump. And they should take heart. They should take solace from that and regain their confidence. But I think that that’s why, even when Trump is in some sense chickening out of his own policies, they think, OK, great, he’s chickening out. Maybe we can talk about health care again, instead of leaning in to try to further neutralize the issue so that he doesn’t keep coming back to it.
What I think they’re going to try is to place a huge emphasis on enforcement in blue cities but in smaller industries—things that aren’t of systemic importance the way food is, the way tourism is—and basically try to make people who oppose Donald Trump already feel all the pain of this and maybe draw out more street protests and maybe hope that those turn violent. I would have worried about that a little more if the L.A. experience had turned out to have worked out in Trump’s favor politically, but it didn’t. But it didn’t. So I think that the Miller protocol is reaching its political dead end. And it’s going to be up to Democrats what to say and do about it in their last effort to try to salvage the policy, partisanize it, and intentionally target Democratic areas.
Sargent: Couldn’t agree more, Brian. And I hope a lot of Democrats listen to you on this. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Brian Beutler’s Substack Off Message. Brian, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Beutler: Always great to be with you.
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