Greg Sargent, staff writer at The New Republic and former longtime Washington Post columnist, joined me to examine why elites keep misreading public opinion about Trump and giving Democrats bad advice as a result.
Even now, as Trump’s approval generally and on “immigration” specifically is in the toilet, there’s a desire to believe that he has tapped into some genuine Völkisch sentiment of the public. But Americans’ views on immigration aren’t hard to understand — and they haven’t changed much if at all since before the election. Most Americans think there should be a path to citizenship for people who have lived here for years. They also think laws matter and should be enforced. They also don’t want to see their neighbors violently rounded up and sent to prison camps — and were not sufficiently warned about Trump’s plans to do just that. (For more on this from me, see “Poll-Washing Our Way to Fascism” and “The Re-Emerging Anti-MAGA Majority.”)
We talked about why The New York Times is both indispensable (this 2023 piece outlined nearly all of the grisly details about Trump’s deportation scheme) and indefensible (by refusing to let that reporting inform their politics coverage, as I wrote in "Does Joe Kahn Trust the New York Times?").
We talked about, as Greg argued recently, “How the Democrats Can Play Offense on Immigration” — by loudly drawing attention to Trump’s crimes against humanity instead of staying silent like so many counsel.
As Greg noted, behind many of the squabbles we hear about wokeness, there is a shadow debate about how politics work — how voters process information and how to persuade them in the Trump era. And too often, the people who claim to be neutral data scientists are being intellectually lazy and affirming their own priors about that question.
