Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
William Saletan: Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Harry Enten (voiceover): Just look at Donald Trump’s not approval among Latinos. In February, it was minus two points. Not too hot to trot, but not that bad either. Look at where it is now. Minus 38 points. That is a shift of 36 points in the wrong direction. The completely wrong direction for Donald Trump and what the race in Miami illustrates. I was looking at the localities, locality by locality by locality. What you see is these huge shift, these heavily Hispanic neighborhoods of Miami against, against the Republican nominee from the Donald Trump baseline. And so to me, this is an encapsulation of what we see. We saw it in Arizona’s seventh congressional district, right? That special election earlier this year, again, a heavily Hispanic district.
Saletan: Yeah, there’s now a lot of numbers to back up the thesis that the shift of ethnic minorities, of Blacks and Latinos in particular, to Donald Trump in 2024 has reversed. In the exit polls, which we have in New Jersey and Virginia from last month, you can just see massive shifts in... so I wrote a piece about this a week or so ago. I’m just looking at the numbers I had there.
So that, combined with the races that you just talked about, illustrates that this is not isolated. This is now kind of a broad national trend in which a lot of minorities who thought that Donald Trump was going to be their guy have decided, Eh, maybe not so much. And the Republican candidates down the ballot are paying the price.
“We are respected as a nation again. When will I get credit for having created, with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country? When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago?”
Saletan: No, Greg, I’m kind of shocked. This might be the first time that Donald Trump has acknowledged real numbers. I mean, as you point out, like, he’s denying the real numbers about the economy.
I mean, you don’t have to look farther than the Consumer Price Index and the all-government reports on grocery prices to know that that’s just BS, right? But he lies about the numbers. And then the problem is Americans, of course, who actually go to grocery stores and buy things are like, Actually, that doesn’t seem to be true. So they think things are getting worse.
Sargent: He really does. It’s really surprising. I want to underscore, though, that immigration is a big part of Trump’s unpopularity. I think that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to get their heads around, but a new Associated Press poll has his approval on this issue down at 39 percent.
Donald Trump (voiceover): We had a meeting and I say why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few. From Denmark, do mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.
Will, in addition to what you wrote—which is that this is just naked ethnic persecution—what we heard there from Trump is also the voice of someone who’s just unshakably certain that this is a winning and popular message, don’t you think?
So you live in this bubble where everybody agrees with you, and you generally are in denial of polls, although we just had an exception there. So yeah, you’re gonna think that people are voting your way.
I mean, it was 10 years ago that Donald Trump stood in—I think it was South Carolina—and called for “a ban on all Muslims coming into this country until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said. Greg, correct me if I’m wrong: Mike Pence and a bunch of other Republicans at that time said, No, that’s not America. We don’t agree with that.
Saletan: Yeah, it’s shocking to me. I put out an APB looking for any Republican officeholder who had criticized Trump over his categorical slurs against Somalis—American citizens of Somali descent. I want to be clear: It wasn’t even about legal status. It was just, you are from this country originally.
Sargent: Yeah, they’re 100 percent on board with the ethnonationalism. I want to bring up another way this is all backfiring. To go back to Miami for a second, Eileen Higgins directly targeted Trump’s immigration agenda in numerous ways. The Guardian reported that she criticized not just the ICE raids, which are of course the most visible and dramatic, but also Trump’s ending of Temporary Protected Status. And that resonated among Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians.
Saletan: Yeah, so I think if you go back to the votes of ethnic minorities in this country—let’s take Latinos. I come from Texas. Now, in Texas, there’s a lot of people with surnames like Gonzales and Rodriguez who will tell you they’re white. Their families have been in this country for generations. So yeah, they count as Latinos, but they feel like they are part of this country, they are legal, and they don’t like people crossing the border without legal authorization. And they think—they thought, a lot of them—Well, that’s who Trump is going after. I’m safe; it’s just these people crossing the border illegally that he’s going after.
And the other thing, Greg, is that Trump posted on Truth Social that he was gonna denaturalize people? So that means you’re an American citizen. You were born in another country, you immigrated here, you swore an oath to this country—which, Greg, I never did. I don’t know about you, but, like, I didn’t have to go through a naturalization ceremony. So you’re just born here. So these are people who are American citizens. We told them they were citizens, and Trump is threatening to revoke their status and deport them.
Sargent: Right. And your piece got at that very beautifully. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. I think as you wrote, Trump and Stephen Miller really thought they could test-run this fascism with shock and awe against immigrants and that voters would actually rally to it. If you recall, Stephen Miller was doing all sorts of very ostentatious things for a while there, like lining the White House driveway with mug shots of Latinos and migrants and that sort of thing.
Saletan: Well, it’s hard to tell about this latest round. I mean, you can make the case that... let’s take the Miami election there. And of course the exit polls in Virginia, New Jersey, they break it down by Black, Latino, Asian American. In Miami, they can sort of break it down by neighborhood. So you can see some effect there. In the case of the Somalis, so this is Trump’s new attack. Again, part of what the ethnic demagogue, Trump... part of the strategy he uses is, “Who can I find?” I’m gonna go ahead and draw this analogy. A child predator looks for young people, young women who don’t have families. He looks for someone: “Who can I pick off? Who has no friends? Who has nobody to protect them?”
Sargent: Right, that was inherently something to mock and be disgusted by.
This is over the last couple of weeks. Trump said about Somalia there: “If you look at Somalia, they’re taking over Minnesota. We are not taking their people anymore.” Okay, that’s... there is nothing there about welfare fraud, about crime. It’s just, “We don’t like this country or anyone from it.” Another one: A reporter told him that Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, said he was proud to have a large Somalian community—a Somali community. Trump says, “I wouldn’t be proud.” He said that he’s a fool—about Frey. “I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian community.” That’s a quote from Donald Trump. “The Somalians, the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country.”
Sargent: Well, maybe not to that yet, but what I guess I would point to is maybe what looks a little like a split-screen moment, right? On the one hand, I think it’s really true, as you point out, that broadly speaking, a lot of Americans are just not really tuned into the explicit ethnic persecution, the explicitly fascist nature of it. In other words, a lot of Americans probably hear this stuff and mostly say, It’s just Trump being crazy Trump, you know, and they’re not sort of saying to themselves, Holy shit, this is ethnic persecution. This is fascism.
Saletan: Yeah. I mean, I do think that people are reacting negatively to the ICE tactics. So Greg, earlier you were reading from Trump’s Truth Social post where he talks about... complains about not getting credit for what he’s done on the economy. The other issue where he has complained a lot lately about not getting credit is immigration. He said, “I want to talk about immigration, but my staff won’t let me. They say, ‘Nobody cares about it.’” So the problem for Trump is that he did cut off people coming across the border. And instead of getting credit for that, Americans are like, Okay, what’s the next problem? That went away.
Sargent: Yes, this is what ethnonationalism looks like, basically. And on that score, we have some comic relief to close on. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was utterly humiliated by Congressman Seth Magaziner. Listen to this.
Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.
Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, I believe that people that are in the United States that are citizens have legal status here. Those...
Sargent: So I think this exposes the core of the whole thing that we’re talking about: the white nationalist and fascist agenda that you wrote about. It requires mass removals for ethnic engineering purposes. It requires the mass persecution of particular ethnicities and the threats of denaturalization and all that.
Saletan: There’s actually three levels to what happened there with Noem. So the first one is Trump said, We’re going to go after the criminals. And so what Magaziner is saying is, What about this guy? He’s not a criminal. Some trivial drug thing from a long time ago... a veteran.
And then the third thing is, beyond that, you now have the president saying, never mind you’re not a criminal, never mind if you’re a veteran or if you contribute to the community in other ways, if you have legal status, if you are a citizen of this country, I am threatening to denaturalize you and send you back to the country of your ancestors. And that is so far beyond what anybody, any decent person in America signed up for.
Sargent: And Will, to your point, I really do hope that we get some sort of real, substantial, sustained outcry in defense of Somalis in particular, because, as you point out, they’re really kind of ripe for victimization. Will Saletan, man, it’s so good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. You’re always good to talk to.
Saletan: Thanks, Greg.
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