From “Deportation” to Abduction
How the media and consultant class’s poll-washing enabled the abduction of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—and what comes next
As G. Elliot Morris explained on his Substack this week, “Trump’s immigration agenda is not popular”—despite relentless media reporting declaring precisely the opposite. This profound disconnect between reality and mainstream narratives stems from a phenomenon I've termed “poll-washing.” Poll-washing occurs when surveys create the illusion of popular support, and thus a veneer of democratic legitimacy, for policy notions or slogans that lack support when accurately described.
Consider Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father of three and a union member who is married to a U.S. citizen and has lived here since 2011, abducted and illegally disappeared by Trump’s regime to a notoriously brutal El Salvadorian prison, with court orders to facilitate his return defiantly ignored. Would Americans support what Trump is doing to this man, or to many other almost certainly innocent people who have been disappeared to the same gulag?
For many of us, there was nothing surprising about this. After all, as early as 2023, investigative reporting by outlets like The New York Times (“Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans”), The Atlantic, (‘Knock on the Door’. The former president and his aides are formulating plans to deport millions of migrants,” and the Washington Post (“Trump and allies planning militarized mass deportations, detention camps.”) clearly laid out Trump’s sinister objectives. He openly planned to deploy the military to round up all 11-million-plus1 undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., including those who had peacefully contributed to society for decades, confining them in massive concentration camps before forcibly deporting them. Trump and his allies even openly acknowledged the violent, “bloody” reality required by their agenda, describing it as a necessary cleansing of those “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump also repeatedly campaigned on deporting legal immigrants, and repeatedly promised to invoke the same 1798 wartime law, once used to justify Japanese internment camps, that he is now using to justify the El Salvador disappearances.
But, given Trump’s massive loss of popularity since his inauguration, these abductions—and many other outrageous and illegal actions—apparently are surprising to many Americans. Trump’s net approval rating has dropped a vertiginous 16 points in barely more than two months. The latest Quinnipiac Poll found that more people disapproved than approved of Trump’s handling of deportations (42/53) and immigration issues (45/50), a striking change from the consistent majority support he had on these issues during the campaign and early post-election period, when most people didn’t understand what the bland labels “immigration” or “deportations” would mean in practice under Trump. The same poll found majorities worrying about economic harms from Trump’s tariffs (which he repeatedly promised to impose during the campaign) and disapproving of how he has handled “the federal workforce” (the devastation of which was an explicit goal and plan of Project 2025).
How did we get here?
In the shadow of mid-20th-century atrocities, George Orwell warned us in his indispensable essay, “Politics and the English Language,” that political speech often serves primarily to defend the indefensible through “euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Today, this warning rings truer than ever.
In a stark recasting of Orwell’s original insight, in 2024 it was not Trump and his MAGA allies who cloaked their intentions in euphemism and ambiguity. Instead, it was mainstream media, pollsters, and political consultants who retreated into vagueness—minimizing or outright ignoring Trump's explicit threats in an effort to avoid accusations of bias, partisanship, or alarmism. So-called "serious" observers refused to take Trump’s words literally or seriously, downplaying the dangers posed by Trump 2.0 and dismissing those who raised alarms as overly partisan or hysterical. Consequently, the public was shielded not from exaggeration but from reality itself, dangerously insulating Trump’s fascist agenda from genuine democratic scrutiny until it became too late to effectively challenge.
This is not 20-20 hindsight. I called out the same problems with polling on “mass deportations” in October. In May, I published Does Joe Kahn Trust the New York Times? which highlighted an interview in which the paper’s executive editor said:
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, … immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? … So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.
When Kahn called immigration “favorable” to Trump, he was referring to his own paper’s “don’t ask, don’t know” polling, which consistently failed to clarify the brutal specifics behind vague terms like “immigration” that the Times’ own reporters uncovered. Hiding behind those polls allowed Kahn to claim ignorance and thus sidestep accountability. But more importantly, if it wasn’t the “news media’s [job] to prevent” Trump from winning, he clearly thought it was his job to prevent others from claiming his coverage was intended to prevent Trump from winning. Which meant downplaying the dangers his own journalists reported. That’s poll-washing in action.
Ironically, many of Trump’s explicit intentions would have been condemned as manipulative "push polling" if pollsters had asked about them before his rise. Now, voters must rely on Trump's own blunt statements to understand what he might actually do next, rather than media euphemisms designed to avoid accusations of bias from both MAGA Republicans and centrist Democrats alike.
Poll-washing not only misled the public, but also chilled discourse that could have better raised public alarms about Trump’s dangers before the election. Many civil society leaders were led to believe they stood alone in fearing and opposing Trump’s brutality. Democratic consultants weaponized poll-washed data to urge candidates toward a conciliatory stance, reinforcing the dangerous illusion of bipartisan support for fascist measures disguised beneath neutral policy language.
Poll-washing is neither objective journalism nor in the public interest. Until we confront this malpractice directly, poll-washing will continue paving the way toward darker atrocities yet to come. When history asks poll-washers what they did during the rise of fascism, their answer must be: “We dismissed the likelihood Trump would carry out what he openly promised—and we actively discouraged and discredited those who warned he would.”
For more on how we should talk about this moment in order to communicate the stakes, watch my conversation yesterday with messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio on “Fascism and the English Language.”
Fascism and the English Language
I talked with my dear friend and colleague Anat Shenker-Osorio about her new messaging guide, Fascism and the English Language, and why it’s both morally and strategically important to call a spade a spade when we’re facing a hostile takeover of our government by a fascist regime. As George Orwell said, “If thought corrupts language, language can also c…
Weekend Reading is edited by Emily Crockett, with research assistance by Andrea Evans and Thomas Mande.
I don't understand why deportation equates to imprisonment when there is no due process.
My taxes pay for $6M to imprison these people in a cruel foreign jail. This is no different than rounding up Jews, Communists, disabled people, Gypsies etc. in Hitler's Nazi Germany.
Why do We the People still pay taxes to this lawless, cruel, dictatorship?
TAX REVOLT! GENERAL STRIKE until these people are returned from El Salvador!
Come on People grow a spine and sacrifice for your principles and humanity and law/order democratic republic We once considered our home.
At least walk-out of work, schools as the children did after a mass shooting in another school last year!
Let's make a plan!
First of all, I am heartened to see how you, Michael, a person who has dedicated his entire life to union organizing and the betterment it can bring to the lives of working people are speaking to the current threats to our livelihood, our standard of living and our rights under the Constitution. I was educated and later returned to work as a health professional for a number of years in West Virginia. So I more or less grew up gnawing on incidents like Matewan, in which ordinary citizens went on strike demanding not special privileges, but a bare minimum of the means to establish home, feed and educate their families. And were mowed down by hired goons for their trouble, hired by people whose values seem closely related to those of our current president. Union organizers, in my considered opinion, have a major role to play in our resisitance to Trump et al. Long may you live.