UPDATE: After we recorded this episode, we noticed that Axios is reporting that anger is rising at Stephen Miller inside Donald Trump’s inner circle, with some White House officials blaming Miller for smearing ICE murder victim Alex Pretti.
It’s now very clear that the horrors we’re seeing in Minneapolis are dividing Donald Trump’s inner circle and roiling MAGA media figures. Two new reports suggest that Trump might be sidelining Stephen Miller. The White House is refusing to endorse efforts by Miller and J.D. Vance to smear ICE’s murder victims. Trump himself is scrambling to put a gentler face on the government’s response to these killings. And a new poll finds that ICE’s standing is absolutely cratering. All this may reflect a deeper miscalculation at play. The MAGA reading of the moment has turned out to be all wrong. Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, spent some time in Minneapolis and wrote a good new piece exploring how the extraordinary outpouring of popular energy there has blown a big hole in MAGA ideology. Adam, really good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start here. The Wall Street Journal reports that some inside the administration want to minimize ICE clashes with protesters, but notes that Stephen Miller is continuing to demand aggressive enforcement and doesn’t want the administration to be seen as backing down. The New York Times reports that Trump met for two hours with Kristi Noem about all this, but Miller was not included. Adam, Miller is like the fount of Trump’s ethno-nationalist agenda. I think it’s clear there’s a real ideological split emerging inside the administration. What do you make of this?
And when he says, “If you bring the third world, you become the third world,” that type of rhetoric—the implication is not that immigration is the problem. It is that the presence of people who are not white is the problem. So as long as that is the issue—the quote-unquote problem that Miller is trying to solve—you know, immigration enforcement cannot be lawful because his actual agenda is ethnic cleansing.
But I think Minnesota has given us a blueprint of nonviolent civic popular resistance that was extraordinarily effective. The thing that I found most inspiring when I was in Minnesota was watching all these people who were so committed to helping the people around them. It was a politics of love. There was no malice in it. It was people saying, I’m not going to let my neighbor get kidnapped. I’m not going to let my neighbor’s kid get kidnapped. I’m going to protect my neighbor’s kid going to school.
Sargent: Yeah, I want to get into the sort of solidarity that we’ve seen in response to MAGA and how it kind of contrasts with MAGA’s vision of solidarity a little later in this discussion.
A majority, 51 percent, want to see spending on ICE decreased. And here again, that’s a solid, large majority of independents as well. Adam, I think the turn of independents against ICE and Trump on immigration is a big, underexplored story. It’s hard to get people to turn against law enforcement, but I think it’s very clear that people widely understand that what ICE is doing isn’t law enforcement in any sense. So you saw some of this up close in Minneapolis. Can you talk about that?
You know, I rode with two separate pairs of observers who were tracking ICE through their neighborhoods, and in both groups people had been stalked home by ICE agents or Border Patrol agents.
But these guys were following people home to intimidate them, to say: “Don’t follow us. Don’t try to protect your neighbors.” And these people know it.
That these men could use lethal force and that if they died, the president of the United States would smear them as a terrorist and refuse to investigate. And they were going out there and risking themselves anyway to protect the people around them. And I just found that tremendously inspiring.And to the point, I think there are a lot of people in the United States with conservative views on immigration who would be fine with a lot of people getting deported, but are not actually fine with masked men in the streets gunning down American civilians in broad daylight.Sargent: Right, and I think the point here is that these guys are really functioning as Trump’s paramilitary force or Stephen Miller’s paramilitary force. They’re not public servants in any sense by now. Everybody’s seen these videos of them doing all sorts of disgusting and vile things in addition to killing people. I mean, just treating people like absolute shit all the time. And I think everybody understands at this point—or at least a large majority really gets—that these people are not serving the public in any sense. They’re serving Trump and Stephen Miller.Serwer: They’re not there to enforce immigration law. They’re there to terrorize American communities for being too diverse or too democratic.It’s completely inconsistent with constitutional democracy. It’s inconsistent with the specific pact made by the states of the United States of America, which is that the federal government does not come around to bully people based on their political views or the political views of most people in the state.
Now remember, Trump came within five points of winning Minnesota last time, which is pretty close given how blue Minnesota has been consistently.So there are a lot of people there who agree with Trump on a lot of things. And yet he can only see these states as colors on an electoral map. So he sent this paramilitary force in there, you know, just to terrorize people and make them miserable and hopefully get some non-white people who immigrated to the United States to leave.Serwer: Yeah, I think that’s right, and I think, you know, obviously the president has had a tremendously and vocally expressed hostility toward immigrants of African descent, whether it’s lying about Haitians eating pets in Chicago or in Ohio, or whether it’s lying about Somalis being garbage. These are, like, shockingly racist remarks. And, you know, this case—the public benefit fraud case in which some Somali Americans were implicated—was investigated by the Biden administration.
And to some extent, it’s possible because the Roberts court said that they didn’t feel like enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment anymore. And Brett Kavanaugh was dumb enough to say, I think it’s common sense to just assume that someone who’s not white or is speaking another language might be an illegal immigrant, so you can stop them and treat them however you want.
Serwer: Yeah, I think that’s right. But what’s actually—I mean, what’s interesting, though, is there’s this whole MAGA theory that the problem with America is diversity. And we have too much diversity and that’s why we have so much, like, discord or whatever. And it’s really a case of the arsonist setting the house on fire and then complaining that it’s too hot in there.
And the federal government and Trump lost the first round, but that would not have been possible if people like Miller and JD Vance’s assumption that multicultural communities are somehow less cohesive was actually true. What makes the multiculturalism or what makes multicultural communities less cohesive is racist demagogues who attack people because of who they are.
Sargent: Right. As I’ve been trying to argue on the show and did a piece on, MAGA is a much greater threat to social cohesion than immigrants are.Serwer: Yeah, absolutely. Because they don’t believe in liberalism in the broad sense—in the rule of law and equal protection under the law. They don’t believe in those things. They believe there is a class of people whom this country belongs to, and everybody else—everybody else’s rights are conditional. And it’s a sign of weakness if you believe in equality.Sargent: I want to come back to that. I think Trump is also trying to recast all this in another way. After the Pretti shooting, the White House rushed out to declare the killing absolutely justified—smeared Pretti in all kinds of disgusting ways. But now Trump wants to be seen a bit differently on this.Donald Trump (voiceover): We’re doing a big investigation. I want to see the investigation. I’m going to be watching over it. I want a very honorable and honest investigation. I have to see it myself.Serwer: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s obviously bullshit. You know, they have prevented the Justice Department—which is now functionally a corrupt law firm in service to Donald Trump, the man, rather than the public—from investigating this case; they’re to let DHS investigate it. And I think we all know what’s going to happen there.
Because the people who are empowered, the people who have public authority because the public has granted them that authority, when you cannot even know their identity and when they cannot be held accountable, the entire system of democracy has been upended. And unfortunately, whatever Donald Trump is doing right now might be a sort of superficial pivot in order to tamp down the broad outrage against the Pretti killing that we have seen in some unusual corners, even.
Sargent: I think we should talk about Vance for a second, because he really, really miscalculated badly, I think, given his long-term presidential ambitions. He was out there very early on saying that—as he pointed out—ICE has absolute immunity. Complete bullshit, but he’s on video saying it.
But Vance, I think, also misunderstood the country in a pretty fundamental way, not understanding the real source of popular anger about the immigration crackdown and not understanding the commitment of a lot of Americans to diversity and against ethno-nationalism. Can you talk a bit about that?
And he says things like, Americans have a right to not live near people who are not like them. And actually, you don’t. You don’t have a right to control where somebody else lives on the basis of their skin color. But it’s a revealing statement, isn’t it? Because you can contrast it with Minnesota—with Minneapolis—where people would say, I don’t care if you were born in Minneapolis or Mogadishu, you’re my neighbor and I’m going to defend you.
So they’re telling us, I think in some sense, what they have created is a media dynamic where there are a lot of Republican voters who actually wouldn’t agree with that. But they don’t believe that Miller and Trump and Vance think that way because that’s just something the libs are saying to smear them.
But you know, there’s this sort of like weird bubble where the extent of the racism that people like Vance and Trump and Miller have expressed sort of does not reach Republicans who might disapprove of it, because they’re so ensconced in an informational bubble that they don’t actually believe it because it comes from sources that they don’t trust.
But again, they’re not taking the investigation seriously. I don’t think that as long as Miller’s there, he is going to be trying to use the power of the state to do his racist demographic engineering project. So I don’t think anything has changed substantively in, like, a broad way yet. However, you know, the fact that Gregory Bovino is gone does matter in terms of what the people of Minnesota were able to accomplish with their campaign of civic resistance and nonviolence.
Serwer: There’s a limit at which people can rationalize brutality and racism. And the Pretti killing was just so over-the-top, filmed from so many different angles. And again, the fact that we have so many different angles of the killing—and the fact that there are so many videos that the government’s lies about the circumstances of his killing were disproven immediately—is a testament to the courage of the people of Minneapolis who were filming the whole time, like Pretti, who had been trained to say, We’re going to stay back from law enforcement, but we’re going to film what they’re doing in case they do something bad.
Sargent: Right. And I think the essence of this is that ordinary people, by showing extraordinary courage and by making creative use of this little device that they just happen to have in their pockets, are overwhelming White House and MAGA propaganda on all this stuff.
But what I hear you saying in your piece and on here is that we’ve discovered that popular majorities of native-born Americans and U.S. citizens are growing more awake to their social and economic ties to immigrants, and they’re reacting very badly to efforts to divide the two groups from one another. Adam, this is my theory of the moment: Miller is using state violence and thuggery to break up that alliance, but it’s not breaking. You saw that dynamic unfold in person. What did it look like? Am I right about that? Is that what’s happening?
Like, in part, what’s happening here with guys like ICE and the Border Patrol is they are used to dealing with people that the system considers nonpersons. And they are behaving the way that they have learned to behave in the course of their duties, which is now being inflicted on people who Americans are not used to seeing treated that way. And I don’t want to take anything at all away from their sacrifice; what they did was incredibly brave.
But I do think there are, unfortunately, some people in the country who did not recognize Miller’s war on illegal immigration as a war against the American people until it was made clear to them that they could also lose their lives.
Serwer: Thank you so much for having me.
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