Given the recent protests against ICE raids, is President Trump alienating some of his supporters? In this episode, the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle and the columnists David French and Jamelle Bouie convene to discuss.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Michelle Cottle: I’m Michelle Cottle. I write about national politics for Times Opinion, and I am back with the fabulous columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French.
Guys, welcome.
David French: It’s good to be with y’all.
Jamelle Bouie: Yes, pleasure to be here as always.
Cottle: Well, I’m not sure the topic is going to bring you much pleasure because we’re going to talk immigration.
One of Trump’s top campaign promises was to crack down on illegal immigration, which was a big selling point for many of his voters. But in the past week, both of you have written about how one of Trump’s strongest issues, immigration, is shaping up to be one of his biggest liabilities. Does that seem like a fair portrayal of where you guys are with this?
Bouie: I think that’s right.
French: He’s squandered his good will in many ways on immigration.
Cottle: Jamelle, why don’t you start us off with what you wrote about Trump’s response to the protests against the ICE raids.
Bouie: I think the important thing to remember here when thinking about Trump and immigration is that you can’t conflate public support for deportations and public support for stricter border controls with a draconian crackdown on immigrants. Those are two separate things. I think that sometimes those of us in this business don’t give the public enough credit for its ability to have some measure of sophistication. And immigration is one of those places where the public broadly says, “We like the idea of deportations, of removing people from the country who are not supposed to be here.” But I think there is a lot of evidence to suggest that what they’re thinking of is actual criminals. They believe that there’s a large population of undocumented immigrants who are like gang bangers in an L.A.-set movie in the ’90s, low riders and tank tops and all. But that population doesn’t really exist.
And so when they see a bunch of draconian crackdowns on grandmothers and soccer coaches and business owners and people who are just regular members of their communities, they don’t like that. They think it’s excessive. And what you’re seeing in public opinion is that delta between what the public likes in the abstract and what they’re seeing in practice. And that’s the source of Trump’s growing weakness in immigration.
I think the public intuitively says to themselves, “Well, if you have family here, if you’re hardworking, if you have a business, then you’re basically already assimilated, so you should be able to have some kind of path to being a citizen.” But if you’re not doing those things, the public thinks you should get out. And so when they see the president deporting the kinds of people — in again, really harsh and draconian ways — they think should be allowed to stay here, they think, “Well, I don’t like how this is actually playing out in practice.”
The polling showed last month that people support deportations but don’t like the execution. Now that’s simply becoming a general negative view of Trump on immigration, period.
Cottle: I am with you on the theory versus practice. This is always a big thing in politics. I mean, everybody talks about how great it would be to cut the deficit or lower the debt. But then when it comes time to do it, they realize that it’s hard, and you can’t do it without pain and fallout. I think that anybody who is surprised by what Trump is doing with these immigration raids hasn’t really been paying attention, but I guess at this point that shouldn’t surprise me either.
French: I think if Trump had focused on border security and a concentrated effort on deporting criminal illegal immigrants, he would be flying high right now on the immigration issue. As Jamelle said, that’s what people wanted. And I’d also add that I think people also have a perception that undocumented “aliens” tend to be all on welfare or receiving public assistance, which is not the case. Millions and millions are very hardworking folks.
What people are looking for is a secure border, low levels of disorder and readily available goods and services. So if you put all of those things together, what you’re then dealing with is a set of trade-offs. And then the trade-offs when people start to feel pain — such as we saw this flip-flop on the recent announcement they would not target the hospitality or agricultural industries, which was a direct result of people being worried that they’re going to feel some economic pain as a result of deportations. And you see Trump — even Trump — start to waiver a little bit. But then you see that internal battle in the administration with this flip-flop flip back to those industries being on the table for deportations.
And so I think Jamelle is exactly right. There was a very clear, and I would argue, not that difficult of a path for Trump to take. Instead it’s just chaotic. Order was one of the core elements that people voted for in November, not chaos. And this is an element of chaos that is souring people on Trump on this issue and many, many others.
Cottle: So I take that the polls don’t look good for him right now in terms of how he’s handling L.A. That said, Republicans in the Senate are using these protests to argue that this is why you have to push through his “big, beautiful bill.” And Republicans running for office in the midterms are using this to hammer their Democratic opponents because while some people are looking at this as an overreach, one of the reasons that Trump was put back in office is people don’t like chaos at the border. They don’t like these images of people scrawling graffiti on street walls. And whether or not there is a lot of violence or just a little bit of disorder, it comes down to who can spin that the best. And I think what we have seen from the Trump administration and specifically the president is nobody knows how to milk fear and chaos better than this man. That’s his bread and butter.
Bouie: I’m sort of skeptical of Republican spin here and the administration’s spin here. Of course the White House is going to say that they’re in command of the situation. Of course, Republicans are going to say: “Yes, this is great for us. We might be down eight on the generic ballot, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act might be ruinously unpopular with both voters, but this totally is going to work for us.”
What I see in the polling at least is that the public is basically divided on the protests and very unhappy with the deployment of the National Guard, with the deployment of Marines, with the militarization of the response to protest, with the draconian ICE tactics.
I’m just not convinced by the spin. A thing to keep in mind here is that in 2020, when there were larger protests with more chaos and disorder, those protests contributed to Trump losing. They did not benefit him in the general election. He lost in part because of his inability to handle the perceived chaos of the protests. And here we are again with protests, where there may be perceived chaos, and it’s clear Trump isn’t handling them. I see no reason to think that the outcome is going to be any different for him or for Republicans this go-round than the previous go-round.
David mentioned something about the trade-offs in immigration reform. And I think that what the mainstream political conversation is missing about real trade-offs when it comes to border security and internal immigration control is that there’s actually no way to do this without the kind of painful impacts on regular citizens. You cannot actually control the external borders of the United States without creating internal pressures on existing citizens. The two things are connected.
And I think that the conversation is missing the perspective that’s basically — if you like the idea of a free society where there aren’t immigration agents roaming around neighborhoods, you have to actually be comfortable with a little less immigration control. If what you want is tight immigration control, then that necessitates the kind of heightened scrutiny by state forces, about who you hire, about who you have in your home, about who you have in your church. You can’t separate the two.
French: I would say there’s a couple of factors here in play. Americans — now, this is going to come across a little bit weird after Trump has been elected twice — but as a general matter, Americans don’t like bullies. They don’t like the people who are seen to be as heavy-handed and disproportionate. They also don’t like chaos, they like order. So, to Jamelle’s point from 2020, there was an awful lot of chaos on Trump’s watch that at times he responded to with an awful lot of bullying. It hurt him on both fronts that he wasn’t seen as somebody who could bring order. He was seen as somebody who was fomenting additional chaos. Chaos was his enemy in the 2020 election.
I think a lot of this depends on what actually happens in the streets. And I think MAGA has a very dangerous assessment of this situation. Their theory of the case is that the far left wants to burn America’s cities and that any sort of sensible immigration policy is going to result in the far left wanting to burn America’s cities. Then the only person who can stand in the gap there is Donald Trump. So when the first brick that is thrown, the first Waymo car that gets set on fire, that starts to lock in that part of the MAGA mind-set that says, “OK, the fires are about to start, the cities are about to burn.” And the one big regret that they have, and Trump has expressed this, the big regret that they have is not bringing in the troops under federal control sooner in 2020.
And so that’s why right after this initial military deployment, I wrote that the Trump administration is spoiling for a fight. I think elements of the MAGA coalition are spoiling literally for a fight in the streets. They think that exertion of dominance and control will be (a) politically beneficial to them and (b) also, again, in their worldview, the only way to really stop the far left from torching American cities.
I think the problem that we face is that there are an awful lot of people who are eager to see some sort of confrontation. And I agree with Jamelle that the political effect of a confrontation isn’t necessarily going to redound to Trump’s benefit. It contributes to this sense that America is in a state of chaos and that it’s out of control. But in the short term, I think it is very dangerous for America that we have an administration that in many ways seems to be spoiling for that fight.
I’m incredibly grateful that the millions of people who came out for the No Kings protest did so incredibly peacefully. I think that kind of protest really drains the power from the MAGA argument, and it drains the power from the MAGA case that essentially they’re the last bulwarks against our cities aflame.
Bouie: Right. What’s happening instead is, you have these peaceful protests and then you have the administration ramping up to create more chaos. I really don’t think this is working in their political favor.
Cottle: I would like to be more optimistic, but what I’ve seen from the Trump administration is that the reality on the ground doesn’t matter that much. They spin it the way they want to. So it is a P.R. battle after a certain point. You can have 99.9 percent of peaceful protesters, and it doesn’t matter. It’s like what they do with immigration. They find the one hideous murder committed by an undocumented immigrant, and then that proves that undocumented immigrants are the real danger here.
Maybe it’s also an indictment of the Democratic Party that I’m thinking that they just don’t have it in them to fight that sort of P.R. battle. And you can see the Trump administration getting more and more aggressive. I mean on Tuesday, the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate, Brad Lander, was arrested by federal agents in an immigration courthouse when he was trying to escort a migrant out to prevent his arrest. And as we saw in California, when Senator Alex Padilla got manhandled, this was kind of aggressive and thuggish. And my sense is that the Trump administration knows this plays well with a lot of their voters and that the rest of the country will be upset by it, maybe. But when it comes time to pull the lever in the midterms, they’re not going to be voting on it. So the administration just kind of ramps this up.
And one of the things that makes me even more nervous is Trump is focusing on big blue cities. They want these confrontations in L.A., in Chicago, in New York, where they can push out their urban hellscape narrative. One of the guys running for Senate in Georgia has been saying, “We better pay attention to this because it could come to our state next.” It makes me really twitchy.
Bouie: I understand that nervousness but my view is the White House has a kind of a fundamental misunderstanding of what their coalition is and why they won in November. They did not win in November because they convinced swing voters that the right thing to do was to have all these confrontations and crackdowns. They won in November because of inflation.
You ask people consistently, what was your top issue? The majority says: inflation. What they want from the administration is lowering prices. If Trump wants to hold his coalition together and wants to have that coalition show up to preserve Republican majorities in Congress, then the first thing he should be focusing on is lowering prices.
Notably, Trump has not done that. The public expects prices to go up because of tariffs. And so he’s not doing the things that he was elected to do. And he’s approaching the other issue on which the public had a favorable view, immigration, in a way that is turning the public against him.
And so I think the administration is actually making a fatal and hubristic calculation about its coalition and its political standing. They might be able to cut some videos that are going to do great on X, but the kinds of voters who delivered them the White House aren’t on X, they’re not watching Fox News, they barely tune in to politics. And I don’t know what Trump is doing for them. In fact, I think he’s doing a lot of stuff to antagonize them.
French: I would say about the only people who have as much of a political problem right now as Donald Trump are Democrats. Yes, there is a backlash against Trump, but there isn’t much indication there’s growing regard for the Democratic Party.
And I do expect that there will be some sort of backlash to Trump in the midterms. But in the Trump era, we are in this cycle that shows why Trump is vulnerable and why he’s resilient at the same time. He is vulnerable because once people experience the actual Trump, he starts to alienate some people who voted for him. But then the problem is if Trump is still the main person articulating the concerns that the people who voted for him have, then it’s very hard to squelch MAGA completely and entirely.
And so on the immigration issue, it’s really not enough to say, well, Trump is just way overboard. There are people who have real concerns if the border is too wide open. And who are they going to trust to deal with that? And so I think that’s one of the issues here is that yes, Trump is really incredibly effective at squandering his own good will — not with his core base, of course.
But the Democrats are really ineffective at taking advantage of that, except under terms that are very short-term in duration. So sure, they can win a midterm when Trump squanders the good will, but can they hold people? The answer so far has been absolutely not.
Cottle: The point you made that gives me a little bit more optimism than I’ve been projecting here, David, is the difference between Trump in theory and in memory, and actual in-your-face everyday Trump. I think that the four years he was out of office with Joe Biden in office, people then reverted back to the more hazy, “Oh, he’s a television figure. Sure, he’s got a lot of bluster, but he’s a man of action.” And, “Was it, was it really that bad? I mean, at least he was getting stuff done.”
So they were willing to give Trump another shot, but then the second he gets back into your living room every single day doing all this nonsense, then people are like, “Oh, this is a lot.”
French: Yeah. You know, and it’s funny, you could see this actually in the 2024 campaign. Trump in theory was the big broadcast ads that he did talking about low inflation and secure borders. But then the rally Trump was Trump in all of his weirdness.
And the people he’s losing right now are not the rally Trumpists; they’re the TV ad Trumpists, who are thinking, “I wanted less inflation. I wanted less chaos. That’s what I wanted.” And now we have, you know, “I’m worried about inflation because of tariffs. I’m worried about chaos because of what I’m seeing in Los Angeles.” And by the way, we haven’t even touched on this sort of sense that, “I thought Trump was going to come in and things were going to be more peaceful in the world.”
Bouie: Yeah.
French: That the world was going to be more calm.
Cottle: Oh, you’re not feeling that, David? You’re not feeling soothed globally?
French: Right, exactly. And so a lot of what people thought they were voting for, they’re not getting right now.
Cottle: So one of the things that I think is also happening with the focus on the blue cities is I think Trump is trying to divide the nation even more. We see him going as hard as he can to divide the nation into blue urban centers and red rural America. We can talk about politically what this will mean down the road, but I think even between now and the midterms next year, there’s so much damage he’s trying to do in dividing people as a way to exert power and find a justification for that. It’s so mind-boggling.
Bouie: No, this is an extremely dangerous game he’s playing. I don’t think that Republican apologists for Trump appreciate the kind of real damage it does to the civic bonds of the nation to utilize the power of the federal government to punish Democrat-controlled states — not because they’ve done anything wrong, not because they’re violating the Constitution, none of that. Simply because they don’t agree with your partisan agenda. Simply because they’re exercising the sovereignty they have as states.
You do that enough and people start to ask themselves, “Well, what’s the point in being part of a union if this is how we’re going to be treated? What do I have in common with my fellow Americans in a red state if this is how their leader is going to treat me?”
And I’m always wary of making these sorts of comparisons and analogies, but this is the kind of stuff that causes civil conflict. This is how you get that ball rolling, by convincing a part of the population of the country that there’s nothing they can do to receive equal regard or equal status. That by virtue of their political allegiance or by their ethnicity or by their sexual orientation, by virtue of whatever that’s been devalued by the regime in power, they can expect to receive scrutiny and disregard from the state.
French: Look, if your goal is to go to communities where there are the most undocumented immigrants and remove them, then you’re not singling four or five blue cities for that. There are giant red-state cities that have an awful lot of undocumented immigrants in them. And yet, no, they’re going after Chicago. Why? Because Trump is trying to stoke conflict.
And here’s the thing that’s particularly disturbing that I have experienced that I think a lot of people have experienced, is that — you know, among Republicans, Donald Trump is either the most trusted voice or among the most trusted voices. In other words, when Donald Trump speaks, Republicans tend to believe him. And when Trump uses rhetoric like, “People hate America,” “They’re trying to destroy America,” members of his coalition believe those words. Some of the rhetoric you hear, especially in the darkest corners of the religious right, is beyond imagination. There’s a word that people use to describe Democrats. They call them Demon-crats.
If you’re in that bubble, if you’re in that cocoon, well, yeah, you want to see the Marines. Yeah, you want to see the Army because you’re taking on people under the influence of demons. I mean, that’s the level of rhetoric we’re dealing with here. That’s why this country is a tinderbox, and Trump just keeps pouring gasoline on it, intentionally.
Cottle: So before I let you guys go, I’m going to bring it back to politics and opportunities. So what opportunity do Democrats have on this issue? I mean, polls show that even immigrant voters now trust Republicans more than they do the Democrats. So this is an opening for them. Where do they go?
Bouie: I mean, my thought is that this is a real opportunity to actually be aggressive and try to define the terms of the debate. You have the president underwater on every single issue of note, including his two previously stronger ones: immigration and the cost of living.
So now was the opportunity to just aggressively try to seize the terrain for yourself, to try to define, redefine the party as the party that can handle these problems, that can handle the actual issues facing most Americans. But part of that is going to require from Democrats a willingness to get in the fight, which I still don’t necessarily see. There seems to be this hesitancy, especially among congressional Democrats, about trying to make a splash.
But with the Padilla detention last week and with Brad Lander, you’re beginning to see Democrats realize that if they make a scene, that’s a lot of press, that captures attention, that allows them to seize the stage for a bit, and that can be beneficial. But that’s the kind of energy that they need, right?
Democrats aren’t going to be able to choose the battles they want to fight necessarily. By virtue of having state power, the administration has the ability to choose the terrain. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats are unable to shape the contours of that fight, especially when the administration makes so many mistakes all the time. And so I would see this as just a big opportunity to begin to erase some of the perception of the Democratic Party as passive and responsive to events and create the impression that it is aggressive and willing to seek conflict. One thing about its low approval ratings, a lot of that’s with actual Democratic voters, so recovering with just the base would be an important political game at this point.
French: I think the Democrats’ opportunity is also their risk. Here’s the way I’d put it: Trump’s mistakes and his overreach chew through his good will at a remarkable rate. You can be just anybody on the other side and you’re going to be the alternative to that, and you could have some electoral success.
However, there are still underlying policy issues and underlying economic and geostrategic issues that people care about. And so the question then is, do you have the answers there, too?
And this is something I think Democrats have not fully absorbed: Better than Trump does not equal good. OK? For example, you had all of the lying and all of the corruption around Trump, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. And then when you would point out the lying around Joe Biden and the lying around Joe Biden’s condition, and then to have partisans jump at you and say, “Well, it’s not as bad as Trump,” that’s not a good answer, right? Don’t answer bad with less bad. Answer bad with something that’s affirmatively good.
And I think that is one of the problems we have and why we’ve been stuck in about a 20-, 25-year cycle of these parties just trading off because nobody has really solved the problems, the actual policy problems that people care about. So yes, Trump is going to give Democrats a lot of short-term opportunities. But if they just seize it as a short-term opportunity without providing long-term policy solutions, then their opportunity is also a risk of their next loss.
Cottle: See, this is what keeps me up at night a little bit. I said this before last time around, the Democrats on immigration were just happy to say we’re not Trump. But they didn’t figure out what they believed or what they wanted to do. And so when the Biden team got in there, they completely blew it. And that came back to bite them. And that played a role in Trump’s return.
Now is the time for Democrats to figure out what they believe and what they stand for, aside from just, “Well, we’re not draconian and cruel.”
Bouie: Well, I mean this does get to structural issues in American governance, right? Not just what the parties are doing, but what the actual system of government allows. I agree with David: that if you win power, you actually have to do things. You have to respond to people’s problems. But that may require what are considered to be perhaps radical approaches to the structures of American government that make that possible. Maybe you get rid of the filibuster, you end it outright to make majoritarian policymaking possible again, so you can do stuff. My view is that Trump is in part an epiphenomenon of the fact that for 10 years Congress was gridlocked and deadlocked and couldn’t do anything because of abuse of the filibuster.
And so the one thing I would throw out there is that part of this challenge isn’t simply an absence of will from the respective parties. But they are conforming to a set of structural aspects of the American system. And maybe it’s worth thinking about changing those structural aspects to make government more responsive to people’s concerns and to create a more direct translation between what people vote for and what they get.
Cottle: Well, that’s why Trump’s blowing everything up, right? I can’t tell you the number of people I’ve talked to who are like, “Yeah, he goes a little far, but at least he’s getting stuff done.”
Bouie: But critically even Trump is subject to it, right? He’s not really getting stuff done.
French: [Laughs] That’s a very good point.
Bouie: He’s breaking a lot of crap, but he is not really affirmatively doing things for people. And that gets to sort of the issue, right? The American system is designed around legislative action and [laughs] we have a broken legislature. And you have to fix that. And that’s a structural problem.
Cottle: And there’s our next sit-down, guys. That could be an entire summer series. So start prepping now! Thank you for joining me.
Bouie: Thank you for having us.
French: Thanks so much, Michelle.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Steph Khoury and Arpita Aneja. Original music by Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
Michelle Cottle writes about national politics for Opinion. She has covered Washington and politics since the Clinton administration. @mcottle
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
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