Trump’s Fury at Gavin Newsom Backfires—and Reveals His Own Weakness
Thus it is that Miller and Trump spent the 2024 campaign depicting all migrants as dangerous criminals in order to sell mass deportations to the voters. Now, however, because there aren’t enough dangerous criminal migrants around, two-bit fascist Miller is frantically urging ICE officials to head to the nearest Home Depot and scoop up as many migrants as possible, to make those deportation numbers pleasing to the raging Audience of One.
The absurdity of this is plain. As Josh Marshall notes, by definition this entails targeting day laborers—that is, going after people who want to work and whose labor is in demand, meaning it inherently constitutes the opposite of hunting for dangerous criminals. Worse, Trump and Miller are not just neglecting serious criminal migrants to target more non-criminals; to do so, they’re also actively shifting law enforcement resources away from other serious crimes, from drug trafficking to child exploitation.
The Trump-Miller answer to the political problem here has been to deport as many people as possible, then label them all criminals after the fact. But that’s also not going well. The courts are standing robustly in the way. And polling data shows that while generalized deportations sometimes poll well, majorities do not support removals of longtime residents, non-criminals and people with jobs. Voters want a law-based, orderly immigration system, but they don’t harbor Trump-Miller’s deep ideological hostility to the mere presence of undocumented immigrants, which MAGA views as itself posing a national emergency.