If Donald Trump has a singular policy proposal that he’s planning on implementing upon his return to Washington, it’s probably his bruising and “bloody” mass deportation of tens of millions of people from the United States. Kamala Harris understands that what Trump is proposing is frightening, darkly warning on Wednesday that the plan could herald massive raids and deportation camps. But even as she takes this message to voters, her own position on immigration is, as The New York Times characterizes it, “a balancing act.” It’s important to identify what, precisely, she’s trying to balance, though: on the one hand a desire to appeal to immigration restrictionists and on the other a moral imperative to treat migrants fairly and humanely.
It’s an odd situation for Democrats to be in, considering that draconian immigration policies are Trump’s bread and butter—to say nothing of his habitual demonization of migrants and immigrants. If something in the Democratic response seems to be sputtering, however, that’s probably indicative of a sad reality: One of Trump’s big political successes was his dismantling of the polite Beltway consensus on immigration reform and taking public opinion with him.
If Trump implements his mass deportation scheme, it would be perilous for just about everyone. As the Washington Monthly’s Robert Shapiro reported last May, the proposal would be economically calamitous—damaging to key industries and certain to “bring on a recession while reigniting inflation.” But Shapiro points to something else beyond the economy that seems like it might leave a deeper wound: “MAGA attacks on immigration also draw on common fallacies and reckless misrepresentations. For example, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have deep ties to their communities and the country.”
This is the heart of the matter: a plan to harm both immigrants and the communities that have taken them in. If you’d like to get a feel for what it looks like when Trump is carving up the U.S. population, one need only look to Springfield, Ohio, which has become a microcosmic example of the former president’s larger design. There we’ve seen the Trump-Vance campaign concoct and stoke lies, for the purpose of putting a town on edge and fomenting mass paranoia and the tormenting of the Haitian community, who settled within the city limits on the promise of well-paying jobs and helped revive their town. Trump’s efforts have led to the bullying of these immigrants and chaos throughout the community, with leaders futilely trying to stem the tide of the campaign’s meretricious lies while contending with bomb threats and other violence.
Haitians are the epitome of a vulnerable group, having arrived here after “fleeing a series of disasters, both natural and man-made, many of them exacerbated or caused by the government and industries of the U.S.,” as TNR contributor Jonathan Katz wrote this week. The way the Haitians of Springfield have been depicted by Trump and his MAGA allies is especially grotesque, and might be more than mere campaign trail politicking: Engendering public animus toward immigrants is a soft launch of sorts for Trump’s mass deportation project—which, as Mother Jones’ Isabela Dias reports, is going to target not only undocumented migrants but legal ones too.
The Haitians facing Trump’s slings and arrows could use a champion. So far, however, Harris hasn’t exactly been their fire-spitting defender. In their debate, Harris passed on an opportunity to take Trump to task for his racist attacks on Haitian Americans, offering only a throwaway comment (“Talk about extreme”) before pivoting; a second chance to assail his deportation plan more specifically ended with Harris roasting Trump for the criminal charges he’s racked up since leaving office. More recently, at a National Association of Black Journalists confab, Harris expressed support for the larger Springfield “community” without actually naming the segment of that community who are facing the full force of her opponent’s cruelties.
None of this is likely demonstrative of some personal animus that Harris holds toward Haitians in general—though her omission does recall an incident from the 2020 campaign in which the Haitian American community in Miami was left feeling slighted by a Harris campaign visit. It’s more in keeping with a deep skittishness that has permeated the campaign, most likely through the advisers she’s inherited from Biden. But it’s also a timidity that elite Democrats all seem to share on the issue. I was never very confident that Trump’s ouster was going to catalyze much of a reversal on Trump’s immigration policy. As reporters like TNR contributor Felipe De La Hoz have continually reported during its tenure, the Biden administration has been disappointingly predictable.
As Axios reports, the progressives who want a clean break with Trump’s immigration designs are hoping that Harris’s recent hawkish stance is a temporary measure, born out of (an assumed) necessity of the campaign trail. It’s hard to fathom from where they derive this hope. Democrats haven’t exactly blazed a path away from Trumpism. Harris herself is still taunting the GOP for following Trump’s orders to kill the Biden-favored immigration bill that, had it been enacted, would have left these hopeful progressives bereft.
And as Washington bends in the direction of more draconian immigration policies, the public seems to have become more cemented on Trump’s side of the issue. According to a September 18 Ipsos poll, more respondents “believe former President Donald Trump would do a better job handling immigration than Vice President Kamala Harris, and Americans broadly do not understand what Harris’ role is, related to immigration.” And while “most support giving a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children,” there is also majority support for some form of “mass deportation.”
It’s amazing how things change in such a short amount of time. During the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans took comprehensive immigration reform seriously and tried to find common ground to create a more sensible, secure, and decent way of admitting people into this country. When Mitt Romney pledged to lead a wave of voluntary self-deportation, his proclamation was considered harsh and embarrassing—the fumbling attempts of a dyed-in-the-wool technocrat courting the fringe. Now Trump wants to banish tens of millions of immigrants, including an untold number of legal citizens, and it’s raising surprisingly few hackles.
There is obvious comfort to be taken in the fact that Harris doesn’t share these extreme views and—I think!—doesn’t share Trump’s love of disappearing a huge portion of the populace. But Trump has drastically shifted the Overton window, and Democrats have done almost nothing to arrest it. The aspirations of comprehensive immigration reformers seem all but dead, and the future of humane immigration policies is bleak indeed. We might as well say it, if only because admitting we have a problem is the necessary first step in solving it: Trump won.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
It’s pretty rare for the Columbia Journalism Review and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban to be dishing on the same topic. But media critics touched a nerve this week with accusations that the political press suffers from a “coherence bias,” particularly as it relates to Donald Trump: the tendency of reporters and editors to take his verbal diarrhea and transform it, through the magic of elision and omission, into statesmanship. TNR contributor Parker Molloy has an even better word for this practice: “sanewashing.”
That this discussion arose in the days leading up to the presidential debate was to the benefit of those tuning in. It likely primed the pump for some of the real-time fact-checking of those moments when Trump seemed to be completely gacked up on whoop chicken, such as his contention that Democrats support “post-birth abortions” and that immigrants in Ohio are stealing and eating pets. But if there’s an agreement to be had on sanewashing, then let it serve as a springboard for a larger and more important conversation: whether the political media’s grasp of policy is truly commensurate with its constant demand for it.
Recent attempts in the mainstream media to understand and explain wonky matters have been embarrassing failures—a dereliction that shares strands of DNA with its tendency to tidy up Trump’s constant barrage of nonsense. A prime example can be found in one of the stories that provoked the sanewashing conversation: the Associated Press’s recap of Trump’s appearance at the Economic Club of New York last week, in which he offered up several paragraphs of word salad in lieu of a discussion of child poverty. The straight story of what happened was a naggingly simple one: Trump dodged a question about child poverty in order to pivot to what he wanted to talk about—tariffs—and shoehorn in his preferred talking points. He did this less artfully than many politicians, but it would have been sufficient to simply say he did not bother to answer the question he was asked.
But the AP didn’t opt for the straight story, and instead constructed a world rivaling George R.R. Martin. In the AP’s version of cloud-cuckoo-land, Trump explicated an innovative idea, in which the proceeds from our trade wars would facilitate bountiful childcare benefits … somehow. It’s bad enough that the AP did all this heavy lifting just to make it appear that Trump used complete English-language sentences in a speech. But considerably more effort was expended here to convert several minutes of sundowner gobbledygook into an allegedly earnest policy proposal. To get there, these reporters had to ignore a vast amount of information and experience, including knowledge of the policies that Republicans have actually supported and the informed opinions of actual experts.
The reality is that what will happen in Trump’s second term looks more like this: These tariffs get applied. American consumers pay more money for goods. The money goes into federal coffers. And the GOP passes (and Trump signs) budget packages that include massive tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, alongside massive cuts to funding for social services.
Could that money have paid for childcare? Sure! It could have gone to baking the world’s largest funnel cake! But in our actual reality, the GOP is adamantly, philosophically opposed to providing government assistance to the people who need relief the most, thus rendering meaningless whatever benefits Trump thinks all of his alleged “big numbers” might provide. This kind of forthright, accurate analysis was available had anyone at the AP understood tariffs at the same level of intellectual heft as the Twitter menswear guy.
This is only the latest example of the vast delta in the political press between acquiring policy information and understanding that information. The signature policy goal of the next Trump administration, to hear reporters tell it, is the facilitation of a massive deportation plan that would evict tens of millions of people from the country. One question that could be asked here (because it’s the first question put to any Democratic policy proposal) would be, “How will you pay for it?” Literally where does the funding to spin up this effort come from? How do you plan to get the United States out of the deep recession that would occur as a result of this population extraction? (If Trump’s answer is, “I’m doing tariffs,” maybe remind him that those proceeds were already earmarked to fix child poverty.)
So it was very weird when—with all these unasked urgent questions—a recent New York Times story portrayed his nigh-on unworkable plan as a linchpin in a proposal to ameliorate the affordable housing crisis: “Harris and Trump both have plans to address America’s affordable housing crisis,” the story originally read. “Hers include tax cuts and a benefit for first-time buyers, and his include deportations and lower interest rates.” (The story was later stealth-edited to massage these sentences out of existence.)
The original contention of the piece was to portray economists as equally skeptical of both candidates’ housing proposals. But here, the entire idea that a mass deportation plan would play a role comes bull-rushing into the discussion without warning and without any explanation of how it would work. Would low-income Americans be literally moved into the domiciles of freshly evicted immigrants? No one knows, and no one can say! (And to be honest, “economists” would probably be even more keen to find out how Trump’s plan to issue massive tax cuts for the wealthy—and the ballooning deficits that would follow—would somehow lead to lower interest rates. The Times just takes it on faith that Trump will somehow magically summon them from the economic wreckage of his grand design.)
That so much falls by the wayside in covering Trump’s policy proposals might be somewhat acceptable if this lackadaisical approach was consistently applied across the board, but this hasn’t been the case. I am sympathetic to journalists, from campaign reporters to The New Republic’s Alex Shephard, who think Kamala Harris ought to put more meat on the bone in terms of policy, but we should be at least as demanding that Trump answer the “How?” and “WTF?” questions that his ideas engender.
What’s very clearly emerged from recent weeks of campaign trail coverage is a rather glaring disparity. On one hand, we have an eminently defensible drive to get Harris to pony up more details of what she wants to do as president, and real scrutiny being paid to how much her policy preferences have shifted in the past five years. On the other hand, we have reporters dutifully filling in Trump’s blanks, excusing his psychopathic edges, and inventing weird cause-and-effect chains that purport to explain how his ideas work. I’m glad that the press is taking Trump both literally and seriously, but no one can look seriously at the literal details of his “proposals” and conclude they make any sense. To pretend otherwise is to write fiction, not journalism.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
Our little experiment in multiracial democracy rarely leaves an encounter with the Supreme Court unscathed, but Monday’s 9–0 decision in Trump v. Anderson—in which the justices ruled that Colorado could not keep Donald Trump off the ballot—has left a deeper wound than most. As The New Republic’s Matt Ford explained soon after the unanimous, unsigned per curiam decision was handed down, the ruling is an absolute cock-up that willfully misinterpreted the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment, seemed to misunderstand how either the Constitution or most elections in the United States work, took up questions that hadn’t been brought before the court in the first place, and found terrible ways to answer them.
The American people began the day armed with a constitutional fail-safe that provided them with the means of keeping an insurrectionist off the ballot. By noon, the court had ruled that they weren’t entitled to that tool, that it would be up to the voters themselves to decide whether an insurrectionist can hold higher office, and that their decision was subject to review and reversal in the form of a subsequent insurrection. Seems like a bad way to run a country.
As far as the legal matters in play are concerned, the ruling is, for the lack of a more polite descriptor, hot garbage—a sentiment, as Ford documented, shared by many people, including those who actually believed Trump should remain on the ballot. But outside of the jurisprudential hash left steaming on the courthouse steps, there is a rather savage truth sitting there, sub rosa, in the decision: It seems the Roberts court unanimously agrees that the Republican Party is truly, and despicably, lawless.
“How could the court butcher the ruling so badly?” asked Ford. “The simplest answer appears to be fear.” Fear was especially apparent in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s admonition of the liberal trio’s fiery concurrence. “The Court has settled a politically charged issue in the volatile season of a Presidential election,” she wrote. “Particularly in this circumstance, writings on the Court should turn the national temperature down, not up.” It’s a bit rich coming from one of the justices whose rulings, most notably on the abortion rights front, have done a great deal to elevate that “national temperature,” and sow considerable chaos along the way.
But as New Republic contributor Jess Coleman quipped, “Things definitely tend to get messy when a political party unequivocally chooses an insurrectionist as its nominee.” It’s on this precise front that the court curiously avoided taking an obvious escape hatch: disputing that Trump had, in fact, aided an insurrection. Trump’s legal team provided that off-ramp, arguing that the former president was innocent of such treachery. Still, as Ford told me, most of the constitutional arguments that Trump’s lawyers advanced in his defense “only apply if, all other things being equal, he did participate in an insurrection.” That the Supreme Court chose to try to resolve the matter along constitutional lines suggests an admission: They believe Trump to have done the very thing that the Fourteenth Amendment forbids. From there, their mission became to backfill a rationale in support of the notion that Colorado’s remedy would cause too much pandemonium if it were to be administered.
But as they put themselves to this task, the court continued to quietly snitch out the GOP for their misrule. At one point, the court warns in its unsigned opinion of an “evolving electoral map” that could “dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and states across the country, in different ways and at different times,” potentially leading to the nullification of the people’s will. Here, Ford said, the court was “essentially caving to threats”—chief among them the ones raised in amicus briefs from a “coalition of Republican-led states” that darkly hinted at the possibility that “some states might exclude other presidential candidates from the ballot if Trump were disqualified.”
Naturally, it’s hard to see why anyone should fear a Republican secretary of state citing the Fourteenth Amendment in an effort to remove a Democratic candidate who had participated in an insurrection. I daresay that I am 100 percent in favor of such Democrats being barred from higher office. Here, however, the justices seem to be implying that the GOP will have reckless disregard for the law, and kick off candidates who cannot be said to have contributed to the sort of crimes that the Fourteenth Amendment inveighs against.
Indeed, we can foreclose the possibility of Democrats abusing their power in this fashion. For starters, at least one Republican secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, had already issued such a threat, the cited reason simply being that he was upset that Colorado and Maine had moved to keep Trump off the ballot. Meanwhile, there is no such behavior among Democrats: Nikki Haley, a more fearsome opponent for President Joe Biden, was left on the ballot, untroubled by Democratic secretaries of state that might have wanted to help the Democratic candidate. (Also, it wasn’t Democrats who sent amicus briefs to the court written in the spirit of “Nice democracy you’ve got here, be a shame if anything happened to it.”)
It’s understandable that the Supreme Court would be worried about a Republican Party that doubles as a criminal cartel, because we’ve seen how, in the Trump era, they have descended into that lowly state, with one of their chief exports being the fomenting of political violence. This fact happened to be on the mind of Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold as she wrestled with whether or not to invoke the Fourteenth Amendment in the first place: After the Supreme Court ruling was handed down, Griswold gave an interview on cable news where she lamented how the insurrection to which she was trying to respond hasn’t actually ended, as threats to her state election officials keep pouring in.
“We have had 38 percent of our county clerks step down since 2020,” Griswold said. “We can’t allow people who would use intimidation or threats to win that battle.” From the Supreme Court came the reply: If you don’t allow those people to win, the Republican Party might very well hurt you next.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.