The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Democrats notched more big wins that show President Trump is really killing his party. A Democrat won the Miami mayoralty for the first time in decades, fueled by a big shift in Hispanic votes away from the GOP. Dems also flipped a Georgia state legislative seat in a district that Trump won by double digits, among other victories. It’s now clear that Trump’s immigration agenda is a big part of this story. A new poll has his approval on the issue in the toilet and Kristi Noem got badly humiliated at a hearing under tough questioning from Democrats. And in broader terms, Trump knows he’s in political trouble. He unleashed a bizarre self-pitying tirade in which he all but admitted that his polling is bad, which may be a first. William Saletan, a staff writer for The Bulwark, has a great new piece arguing that at its core, Trump’s agenda has now become one of explicit ethnic persecution. We’re going to talk about that and about how badly this is politically backfiring for Trump. Will, great to have you on, man.
William Saletan: Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: OK, so Democrat Eileen Higgins won the mayoralty in Miami—the first time a Democrat has done this in decades. There was an 18-point shift to Democrats overall and also big shifts among Hispanics. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten talked about Trump’s broader national decline among Latinos and also about what happened in Miami. Listen to this.
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.
Sargent: There, Harry talked about how Trump has lost 36 points nationally among Latinos and talked about how, in Miami, heavily Hispanic neighborhoods moved to the Democrats. Will, I can remember that only a year ago, one big takeaway from Trump’s 2024 win was his big inroads with Latinos. And yet now, all of a sudden, one of the big stories at the moment is how fast all that disintegrated. What do you make of that?
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.
Compared to 2024 in Virginia, Blacks and Latinos shifted 13 and 15 points. So 15 points, a little bit under for the two groups, towards the Democrats away from Trump. So that’s in the 2025 gubernatorial election in Virginia versus the 2024 presidential in that same state. In New Jersey, it was twice that. It was a 24-point shift among Latinos, 28-point shift among Blacks—again, away from Trump in the New Jersey governor’s race.
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.
Sargent: I think Trump himself knows he’s in political trouble. He unleashed this strange tirade on Truth Social. I’m going to read some of it now:
“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?”
Will, all that stuff about inflation and the economy is just complete nonsense, but that aside, note that he admits his polling is very bad. I haven’t seen that before, have you?
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 can’t tell you—I watch everything this guy says. I know that’s insane and masochistic. I watch everything he says; I have notes on it. I can’t count the number of times that he has said over the past... since he’s been back in power that prices are coming down, that he’s bringing prices down, specifically things like groceries.
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.
And then he has to, like, deal with that polling information, and is he going to admit it or deny it? And he’s denied it. And I’m just kind of shocked at that post, because it acknowledges at least the indirect truth of the polls being negative on it.
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.
That’s supposed to be his strong issue. Much better on border security, but immigration overall, 39 percent. Now let’s listen to Trump at a rally earlier this week.
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.
Sargent: So during that rant, Trump also said he’s announced a permanent pause on migration from Third World countries. And in addition to all this talk about Somalia you heard there, he’s been saying that people from that country are garbage, and he’s been attacking Representative Ilhan Omar in really the most vile and disgusting ways you can imagine.
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?
Saletan: Yeah, of course. He’s looking at a crowd. I mean, picture yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes at a Trump rally. You’re looking out over the podium. What are you seeing? You’re seeing mostly a sea of white people, and you’re seeing a sea of white people cheering you as you slur various ethnic minorities, in particular the Somalis lately, right?
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.
And of course, the 2020 election denial itself is about Donald Trump’s inability to accept that outside his bubble, people voted against him, right? That can’t be true. So he thinks this issue is a winner for him. I gotta underscore, Greg, that I am kind of dismayed that there isn’t more of a backlash against this.
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.
Sargent: No, that did happen, Will. In fact, I remember very, very vividly that Paul Ryan condemned Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry at some point. I can’t remember whether it was the campaign or in the presidency, but he absolutely went out there and did that. Republicans, during the first term, or at least during the 2016 campaign and the run-up to that—they absolutely did condemn this kind of stuff, and now they’re 100 percent on board with it.
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.
What I got back, Greg, was somebody found a Minnesota state senator—a Republican state senator in Minnesota—and that was it. If anybody else finds anything, let me know. Otherwise, it seems like in 10 years the Republican Party has gone from at least being willing to speak up against a categorical smear and a call for a categorical legal action against Muslims to complete silence or affirmation when the president does this to people of a certain ancestry.
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.
Will, again, Trump’s gains with those types of demographics in 2024 were the thing that got everyone theorizing about a realignment. But now you can see Trump’s actual policies just driving those voters away in droves. And I think that’s a positive. By the way, one other thing we should remember that we were told about 2024 is that those working-class, non-white voters, including immigrant voters, liked certain aspects of Trump’s strict immigration policies, but you know, it’s turning out not so much, right?
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.
What has happened since then? Well, one thing is that ICE has gone around rounding people up—not just people who are here illegally, but people who are here legally. People who look like they might be here illegally—i.e., they have the wrong color of skin, they’re speaking the wrong language. So they’re using these cues. And if you are a Latino person in this country, you might look at this and say, Wait a minute, this isn’t what I signed up for.
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.
So if you are a Latino in this country, you might look around and say, I thought I was safe, but apparently even being a citizen will not protect me if I am speaking Spanish or if my skin is brown or whatever Trump chooses to go after.
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.
And it was very clear that they thought that they were going to rally a majority of the country behind the type of agenda you’re talking about: the fully ethnonationalist, openly fascist agenda. But, you know, I think at least politically we’re seeing a surprising backlash to that. Acknowledging your point about maybe not quite the backlash we want, especially among Republicans, I do think that we’ve gotten a backlash to the explicit ethnic persecution. What do you think?
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?”
It’s a predatory mentality. Donald Trump thinks about ethnicity exactly the same way. “Who can I target in this country? What ethnic group can I go after? Or what religious group can I go after? Who is politically weak, who is vulnerable, and who will no one identify with?” And so Latinos are not as juicy a target for that kind of predator as Somalis. The Somalis are generally Black. They are... you know, in the case of Ilhan Omar, he makes fun of her for wearing a turban, Muslim... You know, he posted—honestly, he reposted on Truth—just a video of Somali Americans standing around listening to music and singing and dancing because he thought that would scare his white audience.
Sargent: Right, that was inherently something to mock and be disgusted by.
Saletan: Yeah, and I want to stress to people that what Donald Trump is doing right now is... it is of the same kind, if not the same degree as—I’m really trying hard not to use the word Nazis right now—but some of these Trump rallies look a lot like Nuremberg and what the crowds cheer for. They cheer for him calling on Ilhan Omar to send her back. Can I just read you three of his lines? Just to be clear on how categorical his words are.
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.”
Imagine, Greg, if any politician in this country said that about the Jews, okay? It is absolutely of the same kind. And one more, he said—this was at his rally in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago—about the Somali immigrants in Minnesota: “They ought to get ’em the hell out of here. They don’t work. 91 percent unemployment”—that’s a fake stat—“The people from Somalia, they hate our country. The people.” So this is raw ethnic venom. And Trump is spewing it, and his crowds are endorsing it. I would love to believe, Greg, that there is going to be a backlash in this country to that, but I have not seen it yet.
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.
And yet on the other hand, you’re getting these spontaneous community-wide uprisings against the ICE raids, against arrests. People are pulling out their phones. This is kind of a new type of community... that’s almost like a new type of solidarity that’s kind of erupting spontaneously in reaction to this kind of thing. And I think that’s pretty surprising in a positive way. Don’t you think?
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.
So he’s not getting the affirmative credit that he used to get from people who were really pissed off about that issue. But instead, what’s happening is the ICE raids are triggering all the negative reaction. Americans are seeing what it looks like when you send masked people out to pick people off the street in vans and take them away and ship them to foreign torture prisons, right? And this is not what they had in mind.
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.
Seth Magaziner (voiceover): How many United States military veterans have you deported?
Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.
Seth Magaziner (voiceover): I don’t believe you served in the military. I haven’t either. But I think you and I can agree that as Americans, we owe everything to those who have served our country in uniform, particularly those who have served in combat. Do you agree with that?
Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, I believe that people that are in the United States that are citizens have legal status here. Those...
Seth Magaziner (voiceover): Madam Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sejun Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989. Like many veterans, he struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service. He was arrested in the 1990s for some minor drug offenses—nothing serious. He never hurt anyone besides himself, and he’s been clean and sober for 14 years. He is a combat veteran, a Purple Heart recipient. He has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have. Earlier this year, you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was seven years old.
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.
But the bottom line is Americans—most Americans—do not want people who are not criminals to be deported, even if they’re here on an undocumented basis, particularly if they’ve been here for years, particularly if they’ve woven themselves into communities, particularly if they’ve had jobs. And I think that’s heartening. And I think that really explains in a big way, or at least partly explains, why Trump is in the toilet in the polls. Your closing thoughts on 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.
So secondly, he’s a veteran, and Kristi Noem seems unaware that there exist veterans who do not have legal status in this country but who have, like, done all the things for us that show that they’re not just an ordinary contributor in the community but have gone above and beyond and taken bullets for us.
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.
So we have to hope, Greg, that the American population, that the American electorate, is mostly people who do not think that just because you are from a certain country or your ancestors came from a certain country that you should be sent back there.
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.