The donors are back in charge of the GOP, for now. But Trump could still turn back the clock with some old-fashioned firings.
The donors are back in charge of the GOP, for now. But Trump could still turn back the clock with some old-fashioned firings.
M idnight has struck. The ICE vans are rapidly turning into pumpkins. The “mantle of anger” that President Trump offered to wear has turned into a Chamber of Commerce T-shirt.
“We’re going to build a wall.” “They’re not sending their best.” “Mass deportations.” That’s all gone now. It was given away as war spoils to the true winners of the Battle of Minneapolis. Not the Subaru moms, or the burnouts playing One Battle After Another in the snow, but the Republican donor class.
You may have thought that Trump’s electoral victories in 2016 and 2024 had buried the 2012 GOP autopsy, the infamous donor-authored prescription that the GOP needed to pass an amnesty and get addicted to talking up illegal immigrants as the heart and soul of free enterprise. But right now, it seems to be back. The administration has said it will take a “softer touch” on immigration. A week ago, the president got behind a program to double the number of H-2B guest-worker visas for the agricultural, landscaping, hospitality, and construction sectors. That is, we’re just cordoning off entire industries now and officially endorsing the idea that these are jobs Americans can’t or won’t do.
But before we resign ourselves to three years of Donald J. Bush, can we at least see if Donald J. Trump, the host of The Apprentice, is in there somewhere? Isn’t it time to start firing some people?
Why was the Battle of Minneapolis such a disaster? We have a name: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. She sidelined the competent Tom Homan, let social media misdirect her priorities, and then turned Trump’s strongest issue against him. The American people want the federal government to operate quietly and efficiently in the background. Noem chose a splashy showdown with a sanctuary city and a mortally weakened governor in Tim Walz. It was a high-profile own goal. The result was to put Border Patrol into a no-win situation. It emboldened those who enjoy cosplaying as left-wing revolutionaries, and it threw a lifeline to Walz.
Along with Noem, Trump needs to wave his hand at and dismiss her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski, who also seems to have a role in “Midway Blitz,” the ICE operations in Chicago. Lewandowski and Noem were not entirely wrong that law enforcement should engage in actions that cause other illegal immigrants to self-deport. But the way to do that isn’t with splashy confrontations over sanctuary policies with native-born left-wingers, hoping that the headline-grabbing chaos inspires fear. That was never going to play with the public. Instead, the way to inspire self-deportation is to slowly and steadily enhance the enforcement of law at worksites.
But now, the political blowback from the violence in Minneapolis — alongside the natural inclination of the donor class to favor the creation of a second-class labor pool to exploit — is coming together to urge the president to jettison his top-line agenda.
Parties can delay their reckoning with the politics of the 21st century. But not forever. The inclination toward restrictionism is only going to grow as native birth rates plummet, and as the financial and emotional price of emigration from the rest of the world continues to drop as well, swelling the ranks of people who are eager to leave their native-born countries. Donald Trump is allowing himself to be pushed into the exact same mistakes that destroyed Boris Johnson’s premiership in the U.K. and that have put the future existence of the Tory party itself into doubt.
The whole point of electing Trump, for many of his supporters, was that his celebrity status, larger-than-life persona, and sheer cussedness made him more impervious to the bipartisan interests that he ran against. He was the only one willing, in that first 2015 presidential debate, to call out the donors and promise to defy them. Now he’s being pushed to enact the very agenda that voters rejected when they chose him. The time to resist is now. And the time for Trump to start holding his second administration accountable is past due.