Trump Blurts Out Surprise Admission About Losses, Wrecking MAGA’s Spin

Everybody has had a good chuckle over Donald Trump’s new admission—delivered in an interview with CBS News—that his immigration agenda helped cause last week’s GOP electoral bloodbath. And for good reason: It comes right after Trump installed Stephen Miller as his new chief of staff, rewarding the architect of that agenda with even more prestige and power.

Yet as absurd as it is, Trump’s acknowledgment is still significant. Here’s why: It sabotages the preferred immigration-related explanation for the defeat that MAGA figures are offering to forestall any GOP softening on the issue. It undercuts JD Vance’s interpretation of the outcome too.

Trump’s admission came after CBS’s Ross Douthat asked if immigration had “hurt” in the midterms. “I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump said. He claimed his sealing of the border was a political positive. But it “hurt,” Trump continued, that he deported “people with good jobs” who had committed only the “one violation” of originally entering the country illegally:

Notably, Trump also acknowledged that “a large group” of Americans think such immigrants “should be allowed to stay.” He added that for this group, the deportations might have been “too tough.”

The careful listener will grasp that Trump didn’t merely claim the deportation tactics themselves—the masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement snatchings, the paramilitary invasions of U.S. cities, the summary executions of innocent people on American streets—were the problem. He took it a step further, admitting that many Americans don’t think this class of immigrants should be removed at all, whatever tactics are deployed to do so.

To put it mildly, this is not the interpretation of the election that leading MAGA figures have adopted. Many have blamed the outcome largely on Trump’s Iran war and adopted other tricks to absolve all that niggling white nationalist stuff of any role in this catastrophe.

Let’s start with Vance. In his much-discussed tweet blaming the war for the GOP loss, Vance also slipped in a diagnosis of immigration’s role. “I’m open to the idea that we should change enforcement,” he said. This has been widely interpreted as a genuine concession. But it isn’t one.

After all, Vance also said that any “establishment politicians who say the solution to our woes is amnesty” is “lying to you.” So Vance merely allowed that enforcement tactics alienated voters. He’s not even entertaining the idea that voters also rebelled against the underlying ideological goal of ridding the country of immigrants whose only crime was to come here illegally in search of a better life.

Other MAGA figures have not only refused to entertain that notion—they’ve redoubled their rejection of it. As The Bulwark’s Will Sommer points out, some went as far as blaming immigration and nonwhite diversity in Texas for the GOP’s wipeout there. Others, like Laura Loomer, flatly declared that the overall results should only intensify MAGA’s commitment to ridding the country of immigrants and making it whiter again. The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer acidly notes that to these figures, the election only underscored that our real problem is that recent immigrants and their descendants get to vote at all.

Meanwhile, several Trumpist political operatives just launched a group called American Ascent, which will recruit young people to seek office on a hard-core “America First” platform. It’s partly founded on the idea that Trump’s mass deportations remain a political winner for the GOP and a major motivator of young voters, so Republicans must not back off from them.

To make this case, many of these MAGA figures have been cherry-picking from exit polls to supposedly show that America sided with them on mass deportations. They keep highlighting a finding that Republicans won very narrowly among voters who say immigration enforcement was “crucial” to their vote.

Yet the exit polls also show Democrats won a majority of those who said immigration enforcement was a “major” or “minor” (as opposed to “crucial”) factor. Republicans won only among the shriveled minority who accord extraordinary, overwhelming importance to the issue—the hard MAGA core.

In fact, the exit polls also show that 58 percent of voters said Trump’s enforcement has “gone too far.” And voters said immigrants “help the country,” rather than hurt, by 61 percent to 39 percent. If anything, Americans just ringingly endorsed racial and ethnic pluralism, as Shikha Dalmia writes, by electing people from a wide array of faiths and ethnicities all over the country.

In short: Most Americans think immigration is good. They believe enforcement has gone too far—not just with its violent tactics, but also with its underlying goal of emptying the country of immigrants.

There’s also the fact that Trump’s mass deportations helped drive high turnout and a swing back to Democrats among Latinos. It’s worth noting an amusing aside here: When Trump made huge gains among Latinos in 2024, MAGA-sympathetic pundits interpreted it as a sign that right-wing anti-immigrant nationalism could appeal to the nonwhite working class. Trumpism could appeal to Latino American citizens with deeper roots here and turn them against more recent arrivals, such as the alleged pet-eating Haitians in Ohio.

But now that Latinos have overwhelmingly snapped back to Democrats over Trump’s treatment of immigrants, MAGA figures have suddenly thrown away the idea that their ideology might appeal to that demographic. So, hey, let’s just deport them all instead!

In his own very limited way, Trump seems to have acknowledged on 60 Minutes that Americans like immigrants. Miller’s appointment means he won’t act on this realization. But his admission still undercuts the MAGA theory of this election, and of American politics more broadly, on a very deep level.

That’s because all these MAGA assessments—from Vance, from those explicit white nationalists, or from those operatives still committed to mass deportations—are linked by a common idea. It’s that these election results do not in any sense demonstrate a need to back off the project of ethnically cleansing the country and making it whiter and more Christian again.

In that telling, the election was not at all a rebuke to the MAGA vision of “heritage America,” the idea that those without deep ancestral and blood ties to the homeland should face expulsion to purify and restore the nation’s true identity. Those MAGA voices are wrong: This worldview, in addition to being based on bad history and terrible for the national interest, is a political fantasy. But to some still holed up in Fortress MAGA, the election results only confirm the deeper wisdom of it.