The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 28 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
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.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
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.
Adam Serwer: Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here.
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?
Serwer: Yeah, look, as long as Miller’s there—Miller has very extreme views on immigration, as you’ve written about, as I’ve written about. He’s a man who thinks that the United States went wrong when it removed the racist restrictions that prevented non-white people from immigrating to the United States. And he has, like, been busy trying to reconstitute those with executive orders.
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.
The removal of Gregory Bovino from Minneapolis, I believe, is a great victory for the people of Minneapolis. It’s not the end of the battle by any means. Trump is sending Tom Homan; he’s trying to rebrand this whole thing. Ultimately, as long as Miller is still driving the agenda, the agenda is going to be 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.
I’m going to make sure my neighbor is having enough food. I’m going to make sure that if ICE is in the neighborhood, everybody knows so nobody gets snatched. And, as we know from the deaths of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, people who are doing this were risking their lives. They could have lost their lives doing lawful, constitutionally protected observing of masked men with guns who had been sent to Minnesota in order to punish the state for not being sufficiently conservative.
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.
First, to your point about how successful this popular movement has been, a new Economist/YouGov poll has some amazing findings: 55 percent of Americans have very little confidence in ICE. That’s a rise of 10 percentage points since last month. Sixty-seven percent of independents have very little confidence in ICE—also a big spike.
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?
Serwer: Yeah, look, these guys are wearing masks. They’re kitted up like soldiers. They look like paramilitaries. They don’t look like cops. They don’t act like cops. They threaten activists.
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.
Everybody colloquially refers—even though it’s both ICE and the Border Patrol, maybe some other federal agencies involved, we don’t know because they’re all wearing masks—people just colloquially refer to it as ICE.
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.
And that is just—it’s completely inconsistent with the rule of law.
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.
Sargent: Yeah, look, I think that’s why they chose Minneapolis to make a stand of this magnitude. It really is a choice of a place that’s understood by a lot of liberals and Democrats and, as you say, by a lot of conservatives in the Midwest as sort of an oasis of social liberalism and diversity.
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.
There was no need to send immigration agents there to do that. The purpose of doing that was just because Donald Trump does not like immigrants of African descent and he wants to scare them into leaving. And I think, obviously, Stephen Miller feels the same way based on his long-expressed views. But that is not consistent with the rule of law. That is just blatant racial profiling.
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.
Sargent: Adam, I think they regard Minneapolis as a “shithole country.”
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.
Because what’s actually happening is—and you can see this in Minneapolis—if there are social assumptions about diversity, about liberals not being sincere, about their belief in multiculturalism, about the effect of violence, about their own efficiency as manly men—if any of those assumptions were true, Minnesota would have cracked. But it didn’t crack. All these people came out. A broad multicultural coalition of people came out to resist the federal occupation in a way that was effective and nonviolent.
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: So, Adam, now Trump wants to appear very determined to get the full truth about this whole thing. And we have numerous top officials, including Karoline Leavitt, now refusing to call Pretti a domestic terrorist. I think they know that they’ve got a problem on their hands—that the country is not as mean and vicious and prone to absolute contempt for the victim as they calculated at the outset. What do you think of that?
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.
They have refused to release the names of these people. Look, the only way a democracy works is if you have accountability. And if you have men whose identities are hidden, who are empowered to use lethal force and have complete immunity in the use of that force—as JD Vance said and tried to walk back—then you don’t have a democracy.
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.
But as long as Stephen Miller is there, as long as JD Vance is there, the agenda will always be the same. They may try to put a different face on it, but the goal is always the same. These are people who hate America as it exists—as a multicultural, multi-confessional, big, diverse country with lots of different people who feel differently about different things. They hate that. They want everybody to be exactly like them. And they are going to try to use state power to make that happen.
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.
He was clearly trying to convey the sense to ICE that they can do whatever the fuck they want out there. He also reposted a claim from Stephen Miller, who referred to Pretti as an assassin who tried to murder federal agents. Vance shares the same ethno-nationalist views that Miller has, and I think Vance is fascist-curious as well. Miller is really the real thing, I think.
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?
Serwer: Yeah, look, I think Vance is an amoral social climber who would say anything in order to gain power. If, you know, Paul Ryan–style austerity was the dominant ideology in the Republican Party right now, he would be a Paul Ryan–style austerity guy. What’s popular in the Republican Party right now is ethno-nationalism. And so he’s an ethno-nationalist.
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.
And Vance saying, Well, if you’re not exactly like me, then I don’t like you. And Miller—Trump has actually made fun of Miller for expressing that kind of sentiment. Yeah, he said something like, Stephen Miller is not going to stop until everybody in this country looks like him. And Miller was like, Yeah, pretty much.
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.
Like, I’ve talked to people who are like, Since when is Donald Trump racist? He wasn’t racist until he ran for president. And it’s like, well, if you look back at the things he’s said and done—just because you thought of him as the nice man on the TV reality show doesn’t mean that he was always that guy.
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 when it comes out in the sense of, like, when they see five-year-olds being detained by immigration enforcement—when they see a nurse who was trying to protect another person being shot in the back while he is prone, face down on the pavement—that breaks the bubble a little bit. And I think that’s why Trump is trying to rebrand this.
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.
Sargent: Right. And however insincere the repackaging, it’s clear that Trump recognizes—even if Miller and Vance are unable to—that they’re on the losing side of public opinion on this.
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.
And they did do something bad. And it was captured from so many different angles that it was impossible for them to lie about it. And any one of those people who were filming could have ended up like him. And they kept their cameras up anyway. They didn’t run away because, like him, they were trying to protect their neighbors. And I just think that is tremendously courageous and admirable. And there’s no way for a man who puts on a mask and a gun to show that kind of courage.
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.
And I want to try to get at a deeper miscalculation that MAGA has made here. You got at this as well. Miller and Vance firmly believe that there’s the silent majority out there that shares their view that modern immigration levels are kind of at the root of all kinds of social problems—social dissolution, an erosion of social solidarity, as Vance likes to put it.
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?
Serwer: It is not breaking. These people genuinely believe in multiculturalism. They genuinely believe in loving their neighbors regardless of where their neighbors are from. But I do think—you know, to some extent, you know, I don’t want to get too dark here—but I do think that the fact that the first two people who were killed—well, not the first two people who were killed, but the fact that the two people who were killed in Minneapolis were white Americans—does make a difference because it illustrates the extent to which Miller’s war on “illegal immigration” is actually a war on the American people. It cannot be confined to people whom—you know—Americans have been willing to turn a blind eye to brutality against.
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.
A lot of the people in Minneapolis—what they’re doing is incredibly brave. I’m not saying that the only reason anybody cared about this is because these people were white. But I do think that, unfortunately, the reality is that there are some people who would not have recognized this for what it was if that was not the case. And I’m not talking about people in Minneapolis. I think the people of Minneapolis have shown themselves to be unfailingly decent and courageous. They have risen up in the past in defense of non-white residents who have been abused by law enforcement. So I’m not talking about them.
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.
Sargent: Well, Adam Serwer, I still think it’s a positive story, and I know you do too, folks. Check out “Minnesota Proved MAGA Wrong” in The Atlantic. That’s Adam’s piece on Minneapolis after his visit there. Adam, it was an enormous pleasure to talk to you.
Serwer: Thank you so much for having me.