The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 10 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 admitted to CBS News that his mass deportations helped cause the GOP’s electoral bloodbath last week. In one way, this is absurd, since he also just elevated Stephen Miller, the architect of that agenda, to chief of staff. But in another way, Trump admitted to something that really does undercut the MAGA movement, and even undermines JD Vance heading into 2028. And the MAGA rage has begun.
We’re sorting through what this means with political scientist Julia Azari, who’s been writing well on this election’s deeper currents for the Good Politics/Bad Politics Substack. Julia, thanks for coming on.
Julia Azari: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s admission. Here he was asked by Ross Douthat of CBS whether immigration hurt the GOP in the midterms. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): I think it both helped and hurt. I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally. Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out, and there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay. If they’re good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel or doing something, right? And in some cases paying taxes. And a large group of people think that they should be allowed to stay.
Sargent: Julia, let’s break this up into pieces. The first key point, I think, is that Trump admitted there that Americans view a lot of undocumented immigrant workers as good people, as if they’re legitimately here in the U.S. despite having come here illegally. That’s anathema to MAGA, isn’t it?
Azari: Yeah, I mean, I think the thing that’s really interesting is that when you look at American political opinion about immigration, it’s actually really sensitive to how the question is phrased and what the framing is. And, you know, Americans consider a lot of different things and have a lot of different kinds of mixed feelings about immigrants and immigration.
But MAGA has been very clear that they’ve used this kind of law framing, but really that they’re also after legal immigration. They’re also out to decrease the number of foreign-born people living and working in this country. That’s been a very, very clear priority. And here Trump really kind of undercuts all of that.
Sargent: The 2024 election was heavily about that. When they went after the Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, for supposedly eating dogs and cats, those people were here legally. They had actually helped revive a Rust Belt city, Springfield. And they were very much targeted by JD Vance, who simply dismissed the idea that they had come legally.
He just declared them illegal, sort of by fiat. And so, yes, MAGA is not about law enforcement. It’s much more about, let’s make the country whiter, let’s reduce the number of immigrants here.
Azari: I mean, I think that it’s also worth noting that once Vance and Trump and Miller have been in power in the White House, their decision that some people are illegal just by fiat is no longer just rhetorical.
There are ways in which the executive branch can make those decisions, and they did do that to the Haitian population living in Ohio on temporary protected status.
Sargent: They absolutely did. The other thing Trump admitted to there is that removing undocumented workers has turned out to be terrible politics for the Republican Party. And this, critically, I think, goes beyond admitting that ICE’s violent enforcement tactics—the paramilitary raids of U.S. cities, the mass kidnappings, and so forth—were politically alienating to people.
It goes further and admits that the underlying ideological goal of removing immigrants itself was unpopular. That’s something that even a lot of pundits wouldn’t admit to for a long time. What did you make of that piece of it?
Azari: Again, this is sort of multifaceted, right? Some of it is about ICE. Some of it is about the kind of broader American experience of watching these kind of masked agents attacking people, removing people, hurting people, in a couple of cases killing people.
And in other cases, it’s really thinking about the role that undocumented immigrants play in our society, and how deeply integrated they are into the economy, particularly the service economy.
And I thought it was very notable to me that Trump brought up these service examples and talked about people working in hotels. It’s a very Trump example of the work that undocumented immigrants do. And it turns out that having people filling those roles is very popular with a lot of people.
Sargent: Yes, he chose landscaping and hotel work and so forth, but he was actually speaking to the experiences of many Americans, who maybe don’t spend as much time in hotels as Donald Trump does, but constantly and very regularly encounter undocumented immigrants in their daily lives. They encounter undocumented immigrants who are integrated into the economy all around us, right?
And I think Donald Trump was quite conscious, if you look at how he said that stuff, that he was delivering a twist of the knife to MAGA in some ways. He was essentially saying a lot of Americans view these undocumented immigrants as good workers, as doing important things, as complementing American workers. And that is a striking thing.
Again, he’s not going to do anything about it. We know that. But still, it’s interesting that he went there, I thought. What did you think?
Azari: Traditionally in Republican politics, I think they’ve really relied on this distinction between legal and illegal immigration. And I think one thing that has been sort of revealed over the last couple of years is that that distinction is not always super clear. Like I said, legal status is something that the executive branch can influence.
But also, what we’ve seen with ICE, and what I think is really worth pointing out, is that ICE has not been terribly discerning about the legal status of the people that they’ve gone after.
And there have been people who are perfectly documented, and people who are American citizens, who have either had encounters with ICE, or who have changed their lifestyle patterns to avoid having encounters with ICE.
Sargent: So in the interview, Trump also said he’s open to working with Democrats on immigration, which, again, is not going to happen, given Stephen Miller’s role. We’ll come back to that. But MAGA figures raged about this. I’m going to read a few.
One leading MAGA guy, Steve Cortes, said, “If President Trump softens on immigration enforcement, it will be a disaster.” MAGA influencer Nick Sortor went absolutely nuts, raging in all caps: “WITHOUT DEPORTATIONS, OUR COUNTRY IS GONE. PERIOD.” Still another MAGA guy, Joey Mannarino, posted: “If Trump does this, I’m done.”
Now, Trump won’t do it, but these MAGA figures are not wrong, in the sense that he admitted to something that’s anathema to them, i.e., that immigrants are good for America, right?
Azari: Yeah, I think that’s right. So I think there’s kind of two things, again, happening here. And one is, this is the danger of operating in polarized politics, is that you have this kind of unsavory choice between the politics—which is, a lot of your supporters are going to want you to demonize the other side—and the policy, which is, you’re probably going to have to work across party lines.
And I think that’s a problem that affects basically everybody in American politics. But I think it affects MAGA in particular, because kind of all they have is juicing up the base with grievance. That’s really an important foundation of the movement.
And so when you can’t do that, what are you left with? You’re left with a bunch of, you know, as you said, kind of angry online people who are very publicly breaking with you. And that’s, in a lot of ways, Trump’s political base.
Sargent: I think what you’re getting at is that MAGA, to an unusually dramatic degree, is all about enemy politics, right? And so whenever Trump is not demonizing the enemy, which he does very well and very frequently and very viciously—whenever he’s not doing that, it’s a big letdown to MAGA, right?
Azari: Yeah, exactly. There sort of is no MAGA without that. Like, Republicans, non-MAGA Republicans, and Democrats also are incentivized to demonize the other side, but there are other things going on in those politics.
Sargent: Yeah, absolutely. So this also breaks with JD Vance in an interesting way. In Vance’s now kind of infamous tweet blaming Trump’s war for the bloodbath, Vance also said he’s open to the idea of changing immigration enforcement.
Now, people have treated that as this big concession, but it just isn’t a concession, because Vance also said that the GOP absolutely cannot respond to this loss with, quote-unquote, amnesty. Vance won’t even entertain the idea that voters might have turned against the deeper ideological goal of ridding the country of immigrants. Yet Trump kind of said it.
Julia, I want to ask you this. I really wonder if this is going to become a real schism inside the GOP, because there’s still plenty of Republicans hanging around who would like to see immigration reform, even though they’ve been a lot quieter in the Trump years. And I wonder if a few of them start to step forward. In fact, we just saw one House member go quite forcefully in that direction. What do you think?
Azari: After I heard Vance’s comments initially, my prediction was that what we would see is a coalition that, instead of actually having it out over kind of core issues, tries to isolate the president. And I think this kind of happens when presidents are in their last two years and they’ve had a bad midterm.
And you kind of saw it with George W. Bush, right? It really becomes about the president and not about the broader political movement. And so, well, this is the person whose fault this is.
Sargent: Can you explain what you mean a little bit by isolate the president? So Vance is taking steps right now to sort of subtly push Trump into his own camp, kind of?
Azari: I think so, yeah. And really to blame bad things that have happened on things that you kind of pin on Trump specifically. So, you know, the decision to go to war in Iran, decisions that he’s made about immigration enforcement—and kind of say, well, these were specific Trump things. They weren’t about the broader kind of MAGA or populist ideology, or whatever it is that they’re going to want to maybe call it later on.
Sargent: It is really interesting. Let’s bring in Stephen Miller’s role here for a second. The New York Times reported something that I thought was of interest. I’m just going to read it, speaking about Miller here: “His top priority, aides said, is rebuilding the fractured MAGA coalition and pursuing policies that will energize the voters who elected Mr. Trump in 2024.” That’s by way of explaining Miller’s desire to continue with a hard-line agenda.
Julia, it seems like there’s, like, a core contradiction here that’s worth drawing out. Like, on the one hand, what Miller is saying is that what went wrong is that the MAGA coalition fell apart. On the other hand, he’s also saying hardcore MAGA voters need to be energized.
But those two things are, like, in contradiction with each other, because it’s the hard-line policies that fractured the MAGA coalition. Yet Miller wants to now double down on the violent white nationalism to energize those very core voters. I just don’t see the way forward for MAGA if that’s their fundamental understanding of the situation. Do you?
Azari: Yeah, I think there’s sort of a version of this, again, that’s kind of typical in American politics, which is that you have to make this trade-off between energizing your core voters and building a broader coalition. But I think this tension really has animated the Trump project from the beginning. And it’s always been a pretty narrow project.
And so if we’d been having this conversation eight years ago, I would say, well, what we’ve seen is, this is a president who lost the popular vote, and blah, blah, blah. But in 2024, there was, like, this glimmer of a broader Trump coalition. This more multiracial—it was more voters.
And so I think there was sort of, like, this glimmer of that. And I think nobody—not Stephen Miller, not people on podcasts, not Democrats—actually has, like, a clear picture of what that coalition was and kind of where it went.
Sargent: Right.
Azari: Yeah. I think it’s really complicated. But yeah, I mean, I think that’s sort of what Miller’s laying out. And he’s basically saying what you would expect anybody to say after a really bad midterm. But it’s interesting, because the merging of chief of staff and top political adviser, that’s a very complicated merging of roles. I have a lot of thoughts about that.
Sargent: Well, it just strikes me that if you’re going to respond to this election loss by doubling down on the violent white nationalism, you’re just never going to get back to anything close to the coalition that they got in 2024. And I don’t claim to understand that coalition. It is complicated.
I think maybe it’s an anti-inflation coalition, and kind of an anti-incumbent coalition to some degree, and a lot of young people who felt really, really, really disoriented by the upheavals of the post-Covid trauma and stuff. B
ut it just seems to me that Miller is such an ideologue that he is going to claim he wants to rebuild this coalition, but he doesn’t actually give a shit about that. He really just wants to make the country whiter. That’s what he wants, you know?
Azari: Yeah, I mean, everything about his background illustrates that. I mean, just to speak to just observable facts, right? He has no background in kind of building a national coalition. He’s not the architect of any kind of Trumpist 50-state strategy. He’s the immigration guy. He’s the homeland security guy.
And he’s been very clear on his take and his viewpoints. And when you combine that with an administration that can’t run again anyway, I mean, what is he even talking about?
Sargent: I guess the bottom line, though, is that, judging by this MAGA fury at this tiny little admission by Trump, you can really not see Vance get through a primary by moderating in any sense, I don’t think, can you?
Azari: No, I think that’s probably right. And I think that the safest prediction about what the 2028 primary will look like will be a situation in which candidates are really pressured to throw red meat to the base. I don’t know if we still use that terminology. This is, like, Bush-era terminology. But I think that that will be the set of pressures in that primary campaign.
And then when those pressures are really strong in a primary, then there are a lot of questions about whether that can be adaptable to a general election electorate. And that’s what Vance or Rubio or Ron DeSantis, or whoever is going to pursue that nomination in 2028, is probably going to face, some version of that dilemma.
Sargent: And Democrats have an opportunity to really torment Vance by just driving this wedge very deep, by pushing, I don’t know, for example, legislation creating new legal pathways for undocumented workers and stuff.
Sort of saying, well, the president said that these undocumented workers are good workers and good people. Well, does Vance not agree? And that could essentially force both Trump and Vance into some very uncomfortable positions, it seems, no?
Azari: Yeah, I think so. And those types of things that you’re talking about are quite popular and poll quite well. People generally support folks who’ve been living here having a path to legalization. But one thing Vance won’t have to do is cast the fifty-first vote in the Senate, so he’s off the hook for that.
Sargent: That is a very smart observation, and many of your observations today were. Folks, if you want to follow Julia Azari, go to Good Politics/Bad Politics on Substack. Julia, thanks so much for coming on.
Azari: Thank you so much for having me.