President Trump sometimes just says things for the sake of making news, so it’s impossible to immediately know how serious he was in any number of the alarming answers he gave in a 60 Minutes interview on Sunday. But he should remember one thing: No matter what he does, Democrats and the dying national news media will always hate him.
The most concerning moment of the interview came when Ross Douthat asked Trump to name “one thing you would like to work with a Democratic [congressional] majority on.” Without skipping a beat, Trump said immigration. “If they’re good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel, or doing something, right?” he said. “And in some cases paying taxes. And there’s a large group of people [that] think that they should be allowed to stay.”
Yes, there is a large group that thinks that. They’re called Democrats. And yes, there are surely some voters who supported Trump in 2024 and who got a little queasy after deportations took effect, because Democrats, resisting law enforcement, made them deadly. You can’t blame them. Cleaning up a seismic mess like 25 million illegal aliens was never going to be pretty.
But immigration was still an issue on which voters preferred Republicans over Democrats (43 percent to 41), according to an NBC midterm elections exit poll. There is absolutely no reason to start going soft on it now.
Democrats aren’t going to make a deal with Trump that doesn’t grant absolute amnesty to every single alien currently here. A gracious defeat in the midterms is not going to earn him mercy when, in a few weeks’ time, they take control of Congress, which includes subpoena power. They’re coming for him and all of his associates. The news media will attempt to legitimize it and champion it every second of the next two years.
Trump at certain points seems to understand this concept. In a recent interview with New York Magazine (why?) Trump remarked on his Washington, D.C., beautification projects, which conspicuously include him wanting to rename monuments and institutions after himself. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone,” he said. “When I leave here, nobody will.”
Okay, then. The way forward is to slap his name all over that God-forsaken place and continue deporting aliens. He’s term-limited and his party lost Congress. But he still has control over those two things. Letting up isn’t going to change the hearts or minds of his enemies. They can’t wait to bury him. The sooner, the better, from their perspective.
Trump’s supporters are all he has left. That’s always been the case. It would be stupid for him to forget that now.
