Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Vedant Patel: Really good to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Patel: I want to say that I wish I were surprised, but truly, Greg, I mean, this is a playbook out of the president’s first administration. I mean, I think you recall that there was a really poignant moment in which President Trump was saying that he didn’t want immigrants from a certain fill-in-the-blanks, swear-word types of countries. This is the exact playbook that we’ve seen before of dividing this country, targeting sort of immigrant communities. It’s despicable.
Patel: I think certainly we’re seeing that in this second Trump administration, things are increasingly heightened, and they are taking not just their rhetoric but their policy actions to a whole new level.
“This epic moment put an exclamation point on President Trump’s ninth Cabinet meeting of his second term, all of which have been entirely open to the press for the whole world to see.”
Patel: I certainly would say so. Let’s put the policy aside just for a second. Let’s put the Somali piece aside for just a moment. I worked in the press office under President Biden. That is not the way you are supposed to be doing media relations. Let’s remember that these are spokespeople that should be working. Yes, they work for a president, but really, ultimately, their job is to try to inform the American public, be good arbiters of truth and good engagers with journalists, help answer questions, help inform coverage and stories and TV packages and things of that nature. It is not to be sycophants and just be partisan hacks with a taxpayer dime.
Patel: I would say yes, but I mean, this is par for the course with the Trump administration, right? And I think it is what seems to be expected of his senior officials is praise and just flattery when it comes to anything he says. Look, again, putting the policy aside for just a moment. I don’t think there was a single instance in the Biden administration when I characterized what the president was doing or what Secretary Blinken was doing as “epic.” I don’t think that was ever a word that I used because that is not the job. The job is to try to answer questions, convey what’s going on, help inform as it relates to policy and policy decisions and decision-making and thinking and strategy as it relates to trying to govern this country, not flattery and praise that really isn’t rooted in reality.
Patel: So look, this seems to be in line with what we have seen happen in other major metropolitan areas where you’ve seen really increased ICE action targeting individuals. It’s unclear what metric the Department of Homeland Security is using in terms of the types of folks they’re looking at, the types of folks that they’re arresting, and so on and so forth. There are a lot of questions.
But more than anything, more than just like, I think, Somalis, this is another blatant attack on immigrant communities. Obviously, any administration, Democratic or Republican, should be enforcing the law. We should be following our immigration laws. People in this country should be abiding by their immigration laws. But I think this blatant targeting without any clear proof or logic or even kind of theory of what it is is deeply concerning. Look, if people are violent criminals, if they’re offenders, if they are a threat to this country, certainly, I think those kinds of folks should be removed. But I think this kind of just blatant painting of an entire community, of an entire population of folks with one broad brushstroke is deeply troubling and problematic.
Patel: Yeah, Temporary Protected Status—essentially, it’s what it sounds like. People who are in the United States from a particular country, they are protected from removal and returning back to their home country. There are a number of countries, historically, in which the United States has had this TPS program. Somalia is an example. Haiti is another country in which, historically, there’s been a TPS program. Another one is Venezuela, and so on and so forth. And basically, when you designate somebody under a TPS, under Temporary Protected Status, the secretary of Homeland Security will say that any person of country of origin, of fill-in-the-blank country, if they’ve been in the United States since X date because of the conditions on the ground in that country, they are protected from removal from the United States because the conditions in those countries are so often they have to deal with just danger, threat, things like that, human rights conditions, but also impact from natural disasters and things like that. Just whatever all these conditions that make it such that conditions on the ground in this particular country make it so that they should not be returned there. And we’ve had this; it’s a bipartisan program that has existed in this country for many, many years. And there have been a lot of countries in which we’ve had TPS designation for, historically.
Patel: Yeah, I mean, I think the concept of remigration, as I assume that, you know, President Trump and Stephen Miller and others think about it, is basically you denaturalize a certain subset of folks, and then that basically means that they then no longer have grounds to be in the United States and thus can be removed. And it’s clear from just the commentary and rhetoric that is coming from this administration that there seems to be a targeting of immigrants and migrants who candidly are people of color and come from countries that are of a particular background.
Patel: Yeah. So I’m not a legal expert and certainly don’t want to try to get too far into the head of this administration and how this would work. And so how they would actually execute on a policy like this, I have no idea. But I think my broad takeaway is that we should take everything that this administration says at face value. I think the biggest takeaway from the first administration is that we should not just chalk things up to just rhetoric. It seems like when they say something that they have a desire or an intention to act on it. And so how they plan on going about this is unclear, but it seems to be a priority. There’s something that they have said previously, something that the president and Stephen Miller have talked about openly. And I think it’s something increasingly of concern.
Sargent: Well, we should point out that denaturalization is actually very hard to pull off as well, is it not?
Sargent: Just to close out, I think there’s one ominous thing we should point to here: During Trump’s first run for office, Republicans would condemn this sort of thing when Trump did it. In fact, I recall Paul Ryan criticizing Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry at one point. But now, when he goes out there again at a Cabinet meeting in front of 50 cameras and the whole world watching, as Karoline Leavitt put it, almost no Republicans said anything. Former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who’s a Republican, did say something. He said there is a danger in “stigmatizing any ethnic group, any racial group, any religious group.” He added, “I don’t think we want to start having those kinds of words applied to whole groups.” Glad he said that, Vedant, but apparently that’s too much for Republicans to say now, right?
Sargent: Well, speaking of which, just to circle back to Karoline Leavitt, she called this an epic moment that put an exclamation point on Trump’s Cabinet meeting, the whole world watching, et cetera, et cetera. You know, this sort of is of a piece with the broader thing that they’re doing to the press office. And this is something I’d like you to comment on as someone who’s worked as part of a White House or administration press operation. They’ve emptied out the White House press corps of serious reporters, at least to some degree. And they’ve put in a bunch of reporters in quotes who are functionally propagandists. They simply don’t recognize any obligation of any kind to treat the press as an important institution as part of our democracy. Is that overstating it, or am I right?
We absolutely need to be thinking about that. But I think that there is an institutionality to how these briefings have historically been conducted. Honestly, I think that they have worked in terms of the makeup of the press briefing room, how those things have operated. And I think the biggest takeaway is that actually in a well-functioning White House, these are not decisions that the White House press office or the administration makes. There is a reason you have a White House Correspondents’ Association to figure things out like where the seats are in the briefing room, who travels with the president on what trip. There’s only X amount of press seats on Air Force One, right? And so you don’t want to be making those decisions as a government official, as someone who’s a spokesperson for—those are not decisions you want to be involved in, right?
Sargent: And Karoline Leavitt is really just not seriously trying to envision a sort of, I guess, reformed White House press operation in any meaningful sense. It’s just pure propaganda at this point, no?
Sargent: One hundred percent. Those who actually do real journalism on the Trump administration get punished, they get castigated publicly, they get humiliated. And that’s really Karoline Leavitt’s main project. Vedant Patel, thank you so much for coming on with us. Great stuff.
Patel: Really good to be with you and looking forward to next time.
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