If anyone believes that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is “just bluster,” they are deluding themselves. Trump usually says exactly what he wants to achieve and then fights with hammer and tongs to make it happen. Nowhere has this been truer than with immigration.
From the day that he started his political journey in June 2015, going after immigrants—“rapists” who are “bringing crime,” as he stressed on the infamous escalator in Trump Tower—has been his signature theme. Throughout the 2024 election, Trump continued to emphasize this issue. In February, he went so far as to pressure House Republicans into killing a bipartisan border deal that would have given the GOP almost everything that the party has been asking for, just so that he could have an issue to run on.
During his campaign against outgoing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump dramatically escalated his rhetoric. He promised militarized roundups of migrant workers and a massive deportation program. All of these policy promises were sold through dehumanizing rhetoric aimed at both documented and undocumented immigrants, most famously with unfounded stories of Haitians eating dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio.
Immigration continued to poll extremely well for Republicans through Election Day. Exit polls have suggested that the problem was on the mind of voters when they cast their ballot. Voters blamed Biden for having eased Trump-era restrictions in 2021, resulting in a substantial influx of people across the border.
Two of the earliest appointments in Trump’s new administration confirm how integral the issue will remain. Former speechwriter and advisor Stephen Miller, one of the architects of Trump’s first-term immigration program—including the travel ban on people coming from certain Muslim-majority countries—will serve as his deputy chief of staff. The “border czar” will be Tom Homan, the former acting leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Over the next four years, we should expect the anti-immigration rhetoric and policies to ratchet up dramatically. Fighting immigration is not only an issue that Trump has come to care deeply about, but it also serves a hugely important political purpose, as the singular theme unifying his coalition and placing Democrats on the defense.
For former President Ronald Reagan, anti-communism served a similar purpose.
When Reagan defeated incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980, he brought to Washington a vast and somewhat unwieldy conservative coalition that had taken form during the 1970s.
The coalition was not easy to hold together. Many of the factions within the movement did not have much in common and were frequently at odds. There were evangelical Christians, fiscal conservatives, neoconservative Democrats, Wall Street and Big Business deregulators, and traditional hawkish Republicans.
Always the savvy politician, Reagan understood that he alone was not enough to keep his supporters on the same page. So, besides charisma, the president deployed thematic rhetoric to unite them all.
One major rallying point was lower taxation. Reagan argued that income taxes embodied the intrusive nature of the federal government and undercut the ability of the national economy to grow. In 1981, Reagan pushed through Congress a massive supply-side tax cut that benefited corporations and wealthier Americans.
More important than taxation, though, was anti-communism. Reagan had spent much of his time as a conservative railing against the threat that the Soviet Union posed to the stability of democracy and a nuclear-free world. Reagan had risen to national prominence in the 1970s by railing against then-Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (both fellow Republicans) as well as Carter (a Democrat) for practicing the policy of “detente”—the easing of relations—as all three administrations negotiated arms agreements with the communists and accepted steep cuts in defense spending (even though Carter actually increased defense spending in the final year of his presidency).
Washington’s political establishment, Reagan argued, had failed to stand up to the “evil” threat that the United States faced and was allowing tyranny to prevail.
“America’s defense strength is at its lowest ebb in a generation,” Reagan warned in his speech accepting the presidential nomination at the 1980 Republican National Convention, “while the Soviet Union is vastly outspending us in both strategic and conventional arms.”
Anti-communism was an issue that every faction of his coalition could support. After all, during the Cold War, fighting communists had become as American as apple pie. Although evangelical Christians fighting abortion had little in common with corporate executives seeking rollbacks of workplace regulations, reinvigorating the war against communism was an objective that everyone could get behind. Anti-communism also provided Reagan with an emotional and moral rallying cry that that the president could use to scare and inspire voters all with a single sentence.
One of the most successful ads from Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign against Democrat Walter Mondale—which ended in the last major election landslide (Reagan won with 525 Electoral College votes and 58.8 percent of the popular vote)—was called “Bear.” Viewers watched as a big bear slowly walked around the woods. The narrator intoned: “There is a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear?”
Simultaneously, anti-communism put Democrats on the defense. Whereas Democrats could fight supply-side economics as a boon to the rich, they were leery about appearing weak on defense, a charge for which they had suffered since the presidential election of 1972, when Sen. George McGovern suffered a devastating defeat to Nixon after a campaign in which his national security credentials were questioned.
On Capitol Hill in the first half of the 1980s, Democrats struggled as Reagan and his Republican minions—such as Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich—railed against their opponents for ignoring the dangers that the Soviets were creating in Central America and Africa. On the floor of the House, Republicans questioned whether Democrats even cared about the nation’s security and insinuated that they were more loyal to the socialist allies of the Soviets than they were to the United States. Democrats fractured over controversial measures to provide military and economic assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras in their effort to bring down the Sandinista government.
Frustrated with the shellacking that Democrats suffered in 1984, more elected Democrats formed centrist organizations such as the Democratic Leadership Council and the Democratic Policy Commission—including figures such as Sen. Sam Nunn of Georgia and Biden, then a senator representing Delaware—that endorsed investments in new weapons systems such as the stealth bomber and avoided talk of a nuclear freeze.
The council, according to the political scientist Dan Wirls in his book Buildup: The Politics of Defense in the Reagan Era, focused on criticizing planning and rationale rather than spending more on defense. And in its 71-page founding document, released in 1986, the commission proclaimed: “Democrats harbor no illusions about the Soviet Union. Theirs is a totalitarian society that remains an empire in the classical sense.” They sought, according to New York Times journalist E.J. Dionne Jr., “to create a new image of the party … that includes strikingly tough criticism of the Soviet Union.” There were a greater number of Democrats such as Colorado Sen. Gary Hart publicly acknowledging that the party had spent too much time saying what kind of force they were against rather than “when and where do we use military force.”
By the end of Reagan’s first term—with its military buildup, the cutoff of negotiations with the Soviets, and a series of dangerous incidents involving the superpowers in 1983, such as when the Soviets shot down at South Korean airplane and killed all 269 people on board, including a conservative U.S. congressman—many Americans feared the real possibility of nuclear Armageddon.
He was not just bluster, Americans learned. A 1983 ABC movie called The Day After depicted the brutal effects of a fictional nuclear attack on a small town in Kansas and traumatized the nation.
The film, Reagan admitted in his diary, was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.”
Trump has and will continue to turn to immigration for similar political effect. In 2024, the issue helps to hold serve as the glue for his disparate coalition of evangelical Christians, climate change denialists, business and financial interests, podcast bros, and working-class rural Americans.
He has also placed Democrats on the electoral ropes. Almost nobody in the opposition today seems to be talking about a path to citizenship anymore. Even Harris spent much of her campaign hammering away at the fact that Trump helped to kill the stringent border control bill.
Much of the election postmortem has focused on ways in which Democrats ignored the severity of the problem.
“Many Democrats have been in denial about immigration,” observed David Leonhardt of the New York Times.
Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric is dangerous in different ways than Reagan’s anti-communist message was. By the 1980s—when the kind of intense McCarthyism of the 1950s ,which had destroyed the lives of many alleged to be communists, was not as prevalent of a force—the greatest danger was the risk of triggering a war. Trump’s rhetoric, which is stripped of any of the optimism that Reagan always made central, targets specific people who live and work within many U.S. communities.
The only slim hope for those who don’t agree with Trump’s immigration agenda is to remember how Reagan’s presidency ended. When a new leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, emerged within the Soviet Union in 1985, the fever finally broke. Gorbachev had good personal rapport with Reagan and sought to spend political capital to improve relations with the United States, Reagan and Gorbachev participated in several major summits, the third of which culminated with one of the most famed anti-communists signing the historic Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, dismantling a class of nuclear weapons and strengthening verification processes.
If there was a voice within the Democratic Party who could recreate this role within the partisan fault lines of Capitol Hill, then maybe that person could create the opportunity for some kind of breakthrough on an immigration deal. The possibility of the Reagan-Gorbachev exchange was just as fanciful in his first term.
The ideal scenario today would be some kind of deal that brought back some sort of limited path to citizenship as well, with Trump playing the role that the red-baiting Nixon played by opening relations with China. One recent model could be the criminal justice reform legislation that members of both parties joined forces to pass in 2018.
But at this point, the odds remain slim. The intensity of Republican partisanship within the White House would make it difficult—some think impossible—for the president to ever see a Democratic leader in this light. As Max Boot noted in his recent biography of the president-elect, Trump lacks the pragmatic streak that was an essential part of Reagan’s character.
As a result, the odds are not good for a breakthrough being around the corner but, rather, for the new administration to escalate the threatening rhetoric and move to implement policies that deport, restrict, and intimidate immigrant communities. Given that Trump won with anti-immigration front and center, even as he increased his strength in Latino communities, the president will conclude that this path is a winning one, politically.
By 1984, millions of Americans were terrified about what Reagan’s policies were doing to the safety of the world. In a few years, many immigrants might be feeling the same way about their communities, as will the native populations of those who still believe that immigration has been a vital element of what makes America great.
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