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 great to be back.
Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President. Speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?
Sargent: Note that Trump wants to be seen working constructively with officials like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Brian, you’ve written endlessly about how Trump routinely treats blue America as enemy territory. So I think this, plus Trump saying a “softer touch” is needed, strikes me as a tacit admission of political weakness. Your thoughts on that?
And maybe we can talk about some of those other issues a bit later on in the episode. But we should also caution listeners that just because Trump says he needs a softer touch on something, doesn’t mean that people on the ground in Minneapolis are experiencing a softer touch. What he needs is for his image to become associated with wanting a lighter touch.
Sargent: So there’s been a new turn in this whole battle right now. Trump and Stephen Miller are trying to scale up a bunch of vast new prison camps to hold an additional 80,000 migrants to speed up their deportation capacity. Yet this is running into trouble even in red areas.
Beutler: Oh, absolutely. And I think that they wouldn’t have been asking these questions of themselves in the first term. Like in the first Trump term, he had lost the popular vote. There was never this idea in the air that he was represented the true voice of all of America, right?
This time around, that process is only just getting underway now, because for the first year of Trump’s term, corporations were trying to curry favor with him, and a demoralized resistance wasn’t standing up. But over time, as the abuses have become too large to tolerate, you’ve seen what’s happening now with these detention centers happen across a range of sort of MAGA-aligned businesses, right?
Sargent: That’s actually happening with the detention camps. We’ve had a number of indications now—or a number of examples—in which people who owned warehouses were prepared to sell the warehouses to ICE so that ICE could repurpose them as these vast prison camps holding thousands of migrants in them.
You’ve written about this. This is an area where a lot of different strands are coming together to create a cultural moment that’s making it extremely hard to be associated with this kind of Trump-MAGA brand of ethnonationalist sadism. Can you talk about that?
They’re thinking to the day in the future when the video footage leaks from the facilities and we see that the people inside there are being tortured, and they don’t want to be the ones who then have to answer for why they let this obvious atrocity happen in their communities. And I think that for Democrats—if there are any Democrats wondering where to fall on this issue—they should think back to the Democrats who voted to support the country’s reaction to 9/11. They got swept up in the mania post-9/11, when there was at least actually a major terrorist attack that turned public opinion very rapidly.
Sargent: I want to go to Quinnipiac polling for a second. There’s a new poll out—it’s really remarkable. Here are some findings: 63% of American voters disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration laws. 60% say ICE should withdraw from Minneapolis. 61% say ICE agents should be prohibited from wearing masks.
Beutler: I think it started before the federal invasion of Minneapolis, but it owes a lot, maybe the bulk of it, to the rapid organization of the citizenry in Minneapolis and their ability to flood the internet and flood mainstream media with images of what’s really happening, like immigration enforcement, Trump-style: mass deportation.
The public doesn’t want to see violence result from illegal immigration; [they] want there to be consequences for that. And so they’ll say that the border should be more secure, and it should say that we should step up enforcement and deport people who are here illegally. But they also want people who are good members of their communities to be allowed to stay.
Sargent: It’s worth pointing out here that Republicans don’t want it to ever be understood by the American mainstream that immigration can actually be managed in the national interest. That’s their whole game.
My theory on this, a lot of this, is that very few voters really understand that the fundamental problem at the root of all this is that a lot of these people cannot get right with the law. There’s no path for them. If people understood that basic truth—and if people understood that Republicans were the reason that they cannot get right with the law—we’d be in a different place. But I don’t know how to make them understand that.
And I think that, given human nature and the size of the border, it’s never gonna be perfectly solved, but it can be made to function much better. It can be made so that Republican agitprop about chaos at the border can be countered with a clearer truth: that the border is well-managed and that the United States is made stronger economically and culturally by immigration without then having to answer for whatever happens to be going on in the Rio Grande Valley, or with the buses full of migrants that Greg Abbott is shipping off everywhere.
Sargent: That is exactly right, and the numbers from Quinnipiac also go into some of this. I want to read these as well: Voters say most undocumented immigrants should get a pathway to citizenship over deportation by 59% to 34%. Among independents, that’s 61% for a path to citizenship versus 33% for deportation.
What do you think? What would you advise Dems to do right now going forward to try to vault this to this place where we can once and for all reach that synthesis you’re talking about, and take charge of this debate and take it away from them already?
They can promise that much, but they can’t basically say, Vote for us because we have a grand solution to the immigration problem that will get enacted if we have majorities in the House or Senate, ’cause Trump’s not going to sign that bill. Going into election season, I think that much of what they’ll have to do is just point to these atrocities and say, We’ve tried this way—now it’s time to try another way.
Sargent: We’ve got some signs that Trump knows that he’s in a weak position on this issue—at where we started today with the quote that he gave that NBC reporter. And I think that in the context of a presidential race, there will be an opening for Democrats to restate their case.
Beutler: Yeah. This is a point that’s near and dear to your heart—you make it better than basically anybody out there—but one thing that would help in that regard is for Democrats to shake off the sense they walked away with a year ago: that Trump’s victory represented a large and semi-permanent turn of the population against immigration.
9/11 was a mass-casualty event on the scale of Pearl Harbor, and it definitely did rile the national lizard brain. Nothing like that happened in Joe Biden’s presidency. There was no mass catastrophe perpetrated by immigrants to the United States or asylum seekers here. There were just more people here. And so it makes no sense for somebody who then won the election by—whatever, 49.8% of the vote—for people to understand that as a complete rewriting of how the American public thinks about this issue.
They’re essentially accepting the MAGA frame—the entire MAGA argument on some level—that immigration is responsible for a whole host of social ills and social crises, and Democrats need to accommodate themselves to that basic public understanding or perish going forward. And it’s bullshit. That’s the bottom line. It’s bullshit.
Sargent: Exactly. Brian Beutler, great stuff today, man. Really enjoyed it. Always good to talk to you.
Beutler: Yep, likewise. Thanks, Greg.
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