The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 23 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.
President Donald Trump thinks he’s winning the political battle over his hypermilitarized response to the protests in Los Angeles. Emboldened by a court ruling partly in his favor, he’s now threatening to expand his use of the National Guard and the military to other cities. And yet, by most available metrics, Trump is actually losing that fight in the battle for the hearts and minds of the public, which has put us in an unsettling situation. Though Trump has lost a lot in the courts, to some degree at least, they’re giving Trump the impression that he’s got free rein on the domestic deployment of troops. Yet at the same time, he refuses to acknowledge any constraint on him imposed by public opinion turning against his deployment. That seems like a combustible combination. And to sort it out, today we’re talking with Brian Beutler, who just argued on his Substack Off Message that moments like these call for liberals and Democrats to fight a better information war than they currently seem capable of fighting. Brian, always good to see you, man.
Brian Beutler: It’s good to be with you.
Sargent: So an appeals court just ruled that Trump can continue to commandeer the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to immigration protests there. It was a partial win in that this will still be subject to judicial review. We don’t know where this is going to go from here, but Trump can do this for now. In response, Trump tweeted that this was a “BIG WIN” and added that “all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them.” That means more troops in more blue areas. Your response, Brian?
Beutler: I think Stephen Miller is certainly happy with the ruling. I think Trump’s views on immigration enforcement will probably follow public opinion a little bit more closely, and he’ll figure out a way to back away from his most extreme policies if the slide in public opinion continues. But he’ll do it in a way where he characterizes it as some sort of victory—that his heavy-handed policies won the immigration wars—until the next time he needs to do it again. He’s much more a finger in the wind than the strictest ideologues who work underneath him.
Sargent: CNN data analyst Harry Enten looked at some Reuters/Ipsos polling on Trump’s handling of the Los Angeles protests in particular and found Trump badly underwater. This is Harry Enten. Listen to this.
Harry Enten (audio voiceover): Where are we? Well, I think we can say that Donald Trump has lost a political battle when it comes to what has happened out in Los Angeles. Donald Trump’s net approval rating on the Los Angeles process—look at this—overall way way way underwater at minus 15 points. How about among independents or those who don’t identify with either major party? Way, even lower—look at that—minus 24 points on the net approval rating. And of course, this is happening on what should be one of Donald Trump’s … in fact, the best issue for Donald Trump: immigration. And yet when it comes to these Los Angeles protests, 15 points underwater overall and 24 points underwater among independents. No good.
Sargent: So Trump is losing the political battle over the L.A. riots and his hypermilitarized response. Brian, I will say I did think pundits were getting this wrong by simply assuming this would work for Trump as if the site of disorder and paramilitary equipment would automatically cause voters to turn their brains off. But I didn’t expect it to be quite this clear. What do you chalk it up to?
Beutler: When Donald Trump was president the first time, he took actions with respect to immigrants that blew back against him and then he had to back down. And then he lost the 2020 election. And in the post-acute Covid phase of the pandemic, there [were] major flows of immigrants north across the southern border, and public opinion swung in the other direction—aided in large part by Republican propaganda—about what was happening at the border, which helped Trump become president again. But he’s settling back into the kinds of enforcement actions and deportation actions that are likely to cause the same exact blowback he faced in his first term. And you can see that happening.
It’s funny because many of the people who just assume, Well, immigration is Trump’s best issue, so Democrats should get off the issue. They should describe his efforts to gin up street protests as part of some distraction or a strategy to keep Medicaid cuts off the front page or whatever else, are the same ones who have fairly strong faith in this concept of thermostatic public opinion. The party in power is likely to overreach, driving support away from their best issues, helping create a blowback that brings the opposition back to power, and then the process flips. And that’s why you get these swings from Democrat to Republican over election cycles. I don’t know why anybody thought that there was something unique about what happened in 2024, that the same dynamics wouldn’t reassert themselves. But it seems for now that if immigration is Trump’s best issue, that’s horrible news for him because it means that he’s doing extremely badly on basically everything else, right?
Sargent: Yes. Brian, I think what you’re saying politely is that a lot of those pundits who are telling Democrats to get off the issue of immigration are full of shit. On other issues, they recognize the thermostatic nature of public opinion—but then when it happens on immigration, they just pretend not to notice.
Beutler: I think a lot of Democrats and a lot of commentators looked at polling during the Biden years when Democrats were polling worst on the issue and Trump’s numbers on it had improved through the passage of time and collective forgetting, and they saw polling for mass deportation above water—above 50 percent—and they assumed that that meant that basically a majority of the country was as bloodthirsty as Stephen Miller and wouldn’t mind roundups and 3,000 deportations a day and worksite raids and dragnets and things like that. As you’ve been really consistent about pointing out over years and years and years now—
Sargent: Don’t remind me, Brian.
Beutler: —polling on every issue, specifically on immigration, requires a bit of specificity if you want to really understand where the public is. And the public probably is a bit to the right of your median Democrat, but not all the way to Stephen Miller. And if you ask somebody without any context, Do you support deporting people who are in the country illegally? even if the number of them is 15 million, majority might say yes. But if you say, Well, what about the people who have lived here for many years, they’re employed, they have no criminal records? Should they be allowed to get some legal status and then focus the deportation efforts on people who are breaking the law? that’s the position that has the majority. And I don’t think that that’s actually really ever changed, but a lot of Democrats really did convince themselves that if they hewed to that view, that the public would reject them outright. And I just don’t think that it’s ever been true.
Sargent: A hundred percent. Couldn’t agree more. So data analyst G. Elliott Morris looked at a number of polls and found, again, that the public tilts against Trump’s handling of the L.A. protests. And at the same time, he found Trump’s general approval on immigration has dropped into the negative. I think what we’re seeing clearly here is that things that break through the noise and focus people’s attention can move the public against Trump generally. This, again, is another thing that is lost on Democrats generally and on, I think, that certain type of pundit we’re talking about here.
Beutler: The same instinct that makes Democrats and certain liberal commentators reluctant or fearful of the immigration issue—they want to get it off the front page; they want to reduce the salience of it, [which] is one way they talk about it—is rooted in this idea that your best political move is always to try to pivot to your strongest issue. So for Democrats, that tends to be health care, and it tends to be taxes or opposing Republican tax cuts for rich people. I think that I understand the impulse. At the same time, I think it leaves Democrats behaving in this uncanny fashion where Donald Trump does things that have real import—even if they are meant in some sense to troll Democrats, to get them to react in a certain way.… There’s no denying the fact that deporting thousands of people a day is a huge policy endeavor. It’s not a distraction solely. It is, in addition to whatever Trump means it to do as far as media coverage, an important substantive issue that Democrats can’t ignore. And they seem very strange when they say, Stick your head in the sand for this so that we can focus on health care, which Trump is actively trying not to talk about.
And I think it’s misguided both because it’s uncanny, but also because if you just lean into it and make Trump overreach, it erodes his standing both on what he perceives to be his strongest issue [and] generally. If his immigration polling is falling below water as it appears to be, that’s a sign that he is becoming less popular overall. And that’s good if you’re trying to stop him from cutting health care, you know? There’s no contradiction. It’s not that if you try to expose more people to how bad his immigration policies are, you’re letting health care sneak through. I think you are making people distrustful of him across the board, across issues, and it’s going to make members of Congress a little more reluctant to throw their hat in with him on health care as well.
Sargent: Absolutely. And I think there’s another fallacy at the core of all this that I want to try to get at, which is the discussion about issue salience. You’ve written about that topic, and we’ll get to that in a sec, but I think what some of these pundits who make these arguments would say is something like, Well, look, I don’t really know exactly how the handling of the L.A. protests will play, but if Democrats talk about that, they’re raising the salience of an issue on which they’re disadvantaged: immigration. But the problem is that the data shows something very different, which is that when an issue cuts through the noise in a particular way, it raises the salience of an issue in a manner that works against Trump. And so this whole concept of issue salience seems flawed to me. It’s not something that’s immutable. It’s not like an issue can only be salient in one way that favors Trump automatically, right?
Beutler: Absolutely. In the exact same way that Trump can have his highest approval numbers on immigration because people perceive him to be more interested in reducing net immigration and net illegal immigration in the United States but horribly unpopular in the particulars because he goes about it in this Gestapo-like way.… The same exact thing works on the level of issue salience where Trump and some of these pundits seem to be falling into the same trap of thinking, Well, this is his best issue, so he wants it to be salient and people who oppose him don’t want it to be salient. But if he makes it salient and then turns off half the country or offends half the country or more than half the country by proving that his real handling of immigration is cruel and something that most people don’t like, that can’t be good for him.
Sargent: Exactly. I want to talk about how Democrats can prosecute this case. So the other day, Trump openly admitted that his mass deportations are hurting farmers and the economy. I think every major Democrat in the country should have jumped on that by saying, Trump just acknowledged that removing noncriminals is hurting the country. Time to stop doing it, Mr. President. Yet Democrats didn’t make much of this at all. You wrote about this the other day as well. It is a missed opportunity, right? And why did Democrats miss it, do you think? Because this seems to me to be a clear area or opportunity to turn the issue in their favor. They could have made it literally about the kitchen table, right? You know what I mean? They could have said, Trump says that deportations are hurting you at the kitchen table. So stop it, Mr. President. Yet they wouldn’t even do that. Why?
Beutler: I think Democrats have lost almost all of their confidence in their ability to win an argument. Because for the last several years, Trump has outpolled them on immigration, because views that were pretty mainstream among Democrats fell into disfavor during the Biden years, [Democrats think] that if [they] raised their voice at all to say anything of substance about Trump’s immigration policies, voters will hear what they say and recoil in horror. Even just in the last five months of this term of Trump’s second presidency, that doesn’t seem to be happening. When Democrats engage on the immigration issue, it seems to hurt Trump. And they should take heart. They should take solace from that and regain their confidence. But I think that that’s why, even when Trump is in some sense chickening out of his own policies, they think, OK, great, he’s chickening out. Maybe we can talk about health care again, instead of leaning in to try to further neutralize the issue so that he doesn’t keep coming back to it.
We may see that Democrats have to reengage on this or have to try to get this off the front page again in the near future if Trump tries to invade more cities or federalize more National Guards, but I’m not convinced that Trump is going to be so enthusiastic about repeating what he did in L.A. in Chicago and other cities, given how little the public seems to like it. Maybe he tries one more time or something like that, but I don’t think that the experience he just had in L.A. screams out that it would be great for him to take that show nationwide. And that is important information for Democrats to internalize too. Even in deep red territory, when somebody that people who voted for Trump care about gets swept up in Stephen Miller’s dragnet, they’re really unhappy about it. I don’t see how that can be converted into winning politics for Donald Trump.
What I think they’re going to try is to place a huge emphasis on enforcement in blue cities but in smaller industries—things that aren’t of systemic importance the way food is, the way tourism is—and basically try to make people who oppose Donald Trump already feel all the pain of this and maybe draw out more street protests and maybe hope that those turn violent. I would have worried about that a little more if the L.A. experience had turned out to have worked out in Trump’s favor politically, but it didn’t. But it didn’t. So I think that the Miller protocol is reaching its political dead end. And it’s going to be up to Democrats what to say and do about it in their last effort to try to salvage the policy, partisanize it, and intentionally target Democratic areas.
Because then, in addition to the cruelty, the inhumanity, the racism, you have probably an unconstitutional slap in the face of the Democratic Party. Will they just stand up for themselves? And at a time when the Democratic base is really fed to the teeth with Democratic leaders who don’t fight, don’t even stand up for themselves, I think that an effort to replay what happened in Los Angeles in several more blue cities that Democrats refuse to respond to is not going to wear well. There’s already super majorities of the Democratic base that say the Democratic Party should have new leaders. And this would tend to, I think, make those numbers worse for the leaders. So they’re going to have to decide whether they want to stick with their current line, This is all a distraction or we need to increase the salience of health care and try to get these these dragnets off the front page, just submit to them, roll over on immigration—or lean in.
Sargent: Couldn’t agree more, Brian. And I hope a lot of Democrats listen to you on this. Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to check out Brian Beutler’s Substack Off Message. Brian, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Beutler: Always great to be with you.
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