President Trump sat down with CBS’s 60 Minutes after the midterms and said something I did not expect from the man who campaigned on mass deportations.
In the interview, taped Friday at the White House with Ross Douthat and aired Sunday night, Trump was asked whether the crackdown hurt Republicans at the polls. “I think it both helped and hurt,” he said. “I think I got an A+ for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out. But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.”
“Too tough”
Douthat pressed him: did the deportation policy go too far? “Too tough,” Trump answered. Asked again whether it was too tough, he said, “I think it might be too tough, yeah.” He added that the removals “hurt me,” and that he would “love to do something on immigration” with the new Democratic majorities — including a deal for people who have been here “ten and 15 years” working in hotels and landscaping.
That is a real pivot. The BBC notes that in a 60 Minutes interview a year ago he insisted the raids “haven’t gone far enough.” Now he is describing illegal presence as a single “violation” and floating legal status for people who broke that law and stayed.
The Miller contradiction
An hour after the taping, the White House replaced Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller, the architect of the mass-deportation agenda. So the same weekend the President told America the policy might have been too tough, he put its hardest-edged designer in the top staff job. DHS has not announced any stand-down.
The base heard him anyway. On X, conservatives rejected the framing. In a clip circulating Monday, Rep. Randy Fine said he does not feel the policy went too far, arguing that sanctuary states will not turn people over to ICE and force agents to hunt for them. That is not cruelty. That is what happens when local officials obstruct federal law.
What voters hired him to do
Illegal entry is not a paperwork inconvenience. It is a crime. The people Trump now holds up as sympathetic cases — the hotel maid, the landscaper — chose to break that law and remain. Closing the border was the A+. Removing people who should not be here is not the error. The error would be telling the country that enforcing the law against working adults is somehow excess.
Democrats will take the opening. They already want to put ICE under political control. A president who sounds ready to bargain away interior enforcement hands them the argument before Congress convenes.
The bottom line
I am not interested in cruelty theater, and neither are most voters who backed this administration. Get the killers, the traffickers and the drug dealers out first. That part of Trump’s answer is right. But treating every long-term illegal presence as a hardship case waiting for a deal is how amnesty talks always begin. By all means make a speedy path to individual legitimacy with some cost attached. After all, legal immigrants pay for the privilege of entering and living here. Fining/charging illegals of good character makes some sense. It is, and probably was, the right way to go from the start, but not via bulk amnesty.
The midterms were a repudiation on costs, war and trust. They were not a mandate to declare the deportation drive too tough. Keep the border closed. Keep removing people who have no right to be here. Do not confuse a bad election night with permission to abandon the job.