After spending far too much of my time examining exit polls and reading election postmortems, I found at least one explanation for the recent disaster that seems to ring at least partly true.
A lot of people — and I don’t really have any idea of how many, but let’s just agree it’s way too many — voted for Donald Trump believing that much of the radical policy he promised to implement was just your basic Trumpian performance art.
Meaning, they voted for Trump because they figured he’d cut taxes or he’d bring down the price of eggs or because he’s on their team — and not because they believed Trump when he said, repeatedly, that he will turn American democracy on its head.
So, sure, he’ll probably do the tariff thing, but he’s not going to go overboard with the idea and ruin the economy, right?
Yes, he threatened retribution against “the enemy from within,” but he can’t really believe that show trials against, say, Adam Schiff or Liz Cheney or Jack Smith would be a good look. Yes, Trump may be a wannabe authoritarian, but he doesn’t wannabe Stalin, does he?
And the promise to gut the federal civil service laws and fire anyone who doesn’t believe that the 2020 election was rigged, well, who cares about a bunch of bureaucrats anyway?
It goes back to the old line, about whether to take Trump seriously but not literally, or literally but not seriously.
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I’m in the taking-Trump-both-literally-and-seriously camp. I mean, in the last few weeks of the campaign, Trump basically demanded it, ignoring his consultants while getting nastier at every turn and topping it off with the Madison Square Garden hatefest that stood as the closing message of his campaign.
One thing seems clear: We’re going to get an almost immediate test of the literally-seriously theory. And it will probably give us the first real assessment as to whether people are getting what they thought they were getting by electing Trump.
And maybe even more important, whether they care.
As everyone must know, Trump has promised to launch the greatest mass deportation of unauthorized immigrants in American history — and predicted, when discussing Aurora no less, that it would be “a bloody story.”
And with his first appointments, he has doubled down on the notion that we should definitely believe what he said and maybe have some bandages ready.
First, he appointed Tom Homan as his “border czar,” who would, Trump wrote in a social media post, “be in charge of Deportation of All Illegal Aliens back to their Country of Origin.”
Homan, who was a career border patrol officer before becoming the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Trump, made clear his plans at the Republican National Convention: “As a guy who spent 34 years deporting illegal aliens, I have a message for the millions of illegal aliens that President Biden released in our county in violation of federal law. You better start packing now.”
And then it was widely reported that Trump would appoint Stephen Miller, who is a longtime Trump adviser and serious anti-immigrant (legal and illegal) hawk, as his deputy chief of staff and, I guess, deputy czar for deportation.
The history here is important. Both Miller and Homan were strong advocates for the family separation policy in Trump’s first term — a policy that was so repugnant that Trump had to eventually back away from it.
It was Miller — a key architect of Trump’s first-term travel ban on majority-Muslim countries — who first revealed Trump’s plans to militarize mass deportation, to set up large camps to hold those waiting to be expelled, to end birthright citizenship, to make use of the 1798 Enemies Alien Act, last used in the World War II Japanese internment, to launch what Miller described as a “blitz.”
As Miller said at the time, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error. Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
Yeah, spectacular. Miller is also one of the architects of Project 2025 — the draconian outline for a second Trump term that Trump claimed to know nothing about.
And at the Madison Square Garden event, where Miller infamously said that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he described the Trump deportation plan as a guarantee of the “right to live in a country where criminal gangs cannot just cross the border and rape and murder with impunity.”
Believe it.
In Trump’s first post-election interview, he told NBC that he doesn’t care how much it costs — some are estimating in the hundreds of billions — to implement his deportation plan.
“There is no price tag,” he said.
If you’ll remember, Trump said he would begin his roundup in Springfield, Ohio — where he would deport, uh, pet-eating Haitians, most of whom happen to be in the country legally — and also right here in Aurora, which he told us has been conquered by Venezuelan gangs.
How will people react? I’m assuming Homan and Miller, as they have said, will begin slowly, starting with actual criminals, like gang members, before moving on to workplace raids. But whatever Trump says, there just aren’t that many criminals among unauthorized immigrants, unless you mean by criminal anyone who illegally crossed the border or who overstayed a visa.
Yes, Trump did win by promising to deport unauthorized migrants, but if you break this down, the support starts to fall apart, particularly depending on which migrants you’re talking about. Trump says all of them — all 12 million or so who are in the country without papers, although, with his usual disregard for facts, Trump usually puts the number at 20 million or even higher.
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But according to the NBC exit poll, only 40% of respondents said they wanted deportation for most undocumented immigrants. Other polls have shown overwhelming support for offering a path to citizenship to Dreamers — those who were brought to America as children — and other migrants who have been in the country long term.
To round up millions, it would require more than ICE agents and even the National Guard. Local law enforcement would have to be enlisted. And those so-called sanctuary cities, like Denver, would presumably refuse to cooperate, and Trump would likely move to punish them, with the help of a compliant Congress and a compliant Supreme Court, by withholding federal funding.
There would almost certainly be large-scale demonstrations objecting to the roundups, given that they would affect the many mixed families among the migrant population, families in which some members, often children, are citizens and others, including parents, are not.
If the worst comes true — and that, remember, is what we’re promised — what will the Trump voters who didn’t believe it would ever happen think or do?
I don’t know. But we can be pretty sure of this much: We’re about to find out.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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