The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 5 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.
Donald Trump just showed weakness. He admitted in an interview that the events in Minnesota have persuaded him that ICE needs to use a softer touch, and he claimed he’s been working constructively with local officials there, something he almost never says. This comes as Trump’s plans to scale up vast new prison camps for migrants are running into stiff opposition, even in red areas. Meanwhile, a new poll shows that ICE’s standing with the public is cratering in all kinds of surprising ways. We think this has major implications for how Democrats should proceed now. And that’s why we’re talking to Brian Beutler, who’s been arguing on his Substack “Off Message” that Dems need to take charge of these big debates a lot more effectively. Brian, always good to see you, man.
Brian Beutler: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: So let’s start with this interesting exchange that Trump had with an NBC news reporter.
Reporter (voiceover): Mr. President. Speaking of Minneapolis, what did you learn?
Donald Trump (voiceover): I learned that maybe we can use a little bit of a softer touch, but you still have to be tough. These are criminals. We’re dealing with really hard criminals. But look, I’ve called the people. I’ve called the governor, I’ve called the mayor, spoke to ‘em, had great conversations with ‘em, and then I see them ranting and raving out there literally as though a call wasn’t made.
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?
Beutler: Yeah, I think it’s indicative of a real, broader vibe shift against Trump and his administration and the things that his supporters are doing to the country, but maybe most particularly on this issue.
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.
He wants headlines that say, Trump calls for softer touch so that he can weaken and distract the resistance. Move media attention away from Minnesota and Minneapolis, yet continue to deploy oppressive force on the people who live there. So just because he said it doesn’t mean that people are out of the woods and we shouldn’t necessarily fall for the trap he’s trying to set, but he wouldn’t be saying it if things were going well.
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.
Opposition is intense in one potential location, Hanover County, Virginia, which won for Trump by 26 points. A reddish part of New Jersey is opposed as well to one there. GOP Senator Roger Wicker just came out against the new detention center in Mississippi of all places. Republican officials in other locales are opposing these camps. Brian, I think the prison camps are another good place for Dems to make a big stand—maybe nearly as fertile ground as the ICE raids are. What do you think?
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?
He was the true voice of “Trump’s America,” and we were trying to understand that. And so the people who had lost the election—even though they had won the most votes—they turned to protest and boycott to exert pressure on the administration. And it was commonplace for citizens and voters to lead, and then for Democrats to follow, to try to put pressure on Trump on a broad front of issues, and corporations would come along with them.
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?
Avelo Airlines was doing these deportation flights; they had to stop because of public pressure. The “Tesla Takedown” movement has been extremely successful because of Elon Musk’s association with Trump and all the racist things he puts on his social media website. And now I think it’s spilling out into the general culture that if you are seen propping up this administration in anyway, you’re endangering your business.
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.
And you have this community opposition—intense community opposition, sometimes in red places—but you’ve also got these warehouse owners pulling out of the sales, like saying, You know what? This is too much. I can’t sell my warehouse to ICE. I will be a pariah if I do that.
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?
Beutler: Yeah. I think what you’re seeing is that the owners of these warehouses—even the Republican politicians at the local level in these communities where ICE wants to establish these Trump prison camps—they’re thinking one step ahead.
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.
They got swept up in that and they voted to support a war that turned into a quagmire, and also, in effect, to support the country’s torture policy, right? Eventually it came back on them, right? When the atrocities came to light, the war was no longer popular and they all wished they had their votes back. And you just need the moral imagination, I think, one step ahead here to know that even if you’re worried about what it might look like in a 30-second ad to oppose Trump on his “strongest” issue—immigration—is that the safe move is to oppose these things and oppose them on moral principle: that these are places where atrocities are going to be committed and you won’t have any part of it.
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.
A majority, 51%, say the federal government should provide less funding for ICE—“Defund ICE” [is the] majority position now. Brian, what’s happened to ICE here is just extraordinary. I think fundamentally the American mainstream does not see ICE as law enforcement anymore. It’s something else. What do you think explains all this?
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.
It looks like this, right? And as I think you’ve written, there’s no way to do mass deportation of really any kind, but especially the “we-knock-heads” kind, and not have it look like this. And I think if there’s a silver lining to all of this, it’s that it might help us on the other side finally get over what should be a pretty easy conundrum. Which is when you see polling data—which has been pretty, I mean, it swings around who’s in office at any given time—but there’s a pretty steady tension in immigration polling.
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.
And if the people in the public who embody that tension can be made to see that the “Get ’Em All Out” approach looks like this, then maybe we won’t keep doing this toggle between violent nativism and Democrats come back into power and the whole thing falls apart because Republicans say all they want to do is amnesty. You’ll be able to get the synthesis that we’ve been striving for... what, 20 or 30 years now?
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.
So when the Texas governor sent all those migrants up to Northern cities, what they were trying to do is artificially create a situation that seemed to make it look like immigration couldn’t be managed. But of course, Republicans refusing to go along with immigration reform is the actual reason immigration can’t be managed, and they’ve been very good at preventing the American people from seeing that the synthesis is there for them if they want it.
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.
Beutler: Yeah, it’s tough because I don’t even think you have to go all the way back to 2013 and the dissolution of that bipartisan immigration effort. You can just go back to last year—I guess now it’s two years ago—to 2024, when Donald Trump essentially ordered Republicans in Congress to kill the Lankford-Murphy bill because he did not want the public to get the impression that this was a solvable problem.
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.
And that’s why Trump killed it. He didn’t want people to see the problem that way.
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.
Meanwhile, only 38% approve of Trump on immigration; 59% disapprove. That’s on the issue more broadly. And a majority—51%—say Trump’s approach is making the country “less safe.” I think there’s an opening here for Democrats to seize this moment and make a bigger argument about all this—basically to say there’s a completely different way to do all this. We don’t have to be stuck in this hell anymore.
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?
Beutler: Unfortunately, I think a lot of that is gonna have to wait for the presidential election and that the goal right now has to be harm reduction, restraining the secret immigration police… promises to use, checking and balancing power to bring Trump closer into compliance with the law and with the idea that all human beings should be treated with dignity, right?
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.
It will probably help—given the effectiveness of Republican propaganda and the real increase in flows across the border during Biden’s term—for ambitious Democrats to say, We’re not going back to that either. We have a new plan, but we have to do something so that we never do this again. We have these moments like Japanese internment, which are supposed to be the moments that chasten us to not commit atrocities again—and we, because of how the public voted in 2024, have slipped back into that, unfortunately. But if this percentage of Americans that you were just quoting remains morally clear about why this is wrong a year from now, two years from now, then I don’t think it’ll be terribly hard for whoever the Democrats nominate for president to win the argument.
Sargent: We’ve got some signs that Trump knows that he’s in a weak position on this issue—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.
And at that point, enough time will have passed from the Biden years so that they’ll be awarded some credibility by the voters on this—particularly because Trump’s approach has just brought the country crashing down and has plunged the country into vicious civil conflict and violence. There will be this opening to say, We got to really redo this. If you elect us, if you give us the White House and Congress, we are really going to do reform. We are going to fix this problem. We’re going to end all this madness once and for all. That’s what I’m hoping for.
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.
To go back to the 9/11 comparison that we discussed a minute ago: you can replay the events of 9/11 in your head and imagine an even uglier outcome where, in addition to going to war in Afghanistan and maybe Iraq, we do another World War II-style internment here of Muslim Americans. Bush had demagogic tendencies, and his civil liberties record wasn’t great, but he did not do that. But if he had managed to get Congress to go along with it, you’d at least be able to point to a precipitating incident.
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.
Sargent: Brian, just to close this out, to pull all your points together: I think those Democrats who aren’t able to shake off that sense that 2024 represented this seismic cultural shift against immigration are fundamentally adopting the view that the Biden presidency was a 9/11 on immigration.
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.
Beutler: They just got it wrong. It’s okay. But it’s time to acknowledge that and see the world anew. Democrats don’t have a perfect record on this issue. But no party has a perfect record on every issue. And you don’t have to run scared from it just because the election—they lost it by a paper-thin margin.
Sargent: Exactly. Brian Beutler, great stuff today, man. Really enjoyed it. Always good to talk to you.
Beutler: Yep, likewise. Thanks, Greg.