After the Republican Party endured a shellacking last Tuesday, President Donald Trump wasted little time trying to salvage some of its lessons. To do so, he sat for an interview with Ross Douthat, the new guy on the block at CBS News’s “60 Minutes.”
First, a little background on CBS. Former New York Times writer Bari Weiss took over at CBS News a year ago — after having launched the successful Free Press — and she immediately set about making changes to mitigate the eyeball network’s gross left-wing bias. Specifically, she began an overhaul of “60 Minutes,” which included firing longtime correspondent Scott Pelley and others. Anderson Cooper also left. Weiss hired Douthat, a conservative journalist, from her own former paper, The New York Times.
Weiss is no conservative, though, and none of that means CBS is suddenly fair, or that “60 Minutes” doesn’t still have a left-wing agenda at times. Why, just a couple of weeks ago, our Hudson Baldwin hammered the show for its dishonest empathy for a deported illegal alien. But at least Douthat is an honest broker.
So, back to the interview with President Trump. Douthat and Trump talked about many things, but I’ll focus most on immigration after Trump admitted that his deportation policy might have been “too tough.”
The president believes he “got an A+ for closing up the border” and “very high marks for getting the bad ones out.” He’s undoubtedly right about that.
“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,” the president continued. “Now, there is a large part of the country that think that they should be put out. And there’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.”
He’s also undoubtedly right about that. According to exit polling, 58% of voters said Team Trump went too far.
Frankly, Americans hold a contradictory position on immigration. Most folks think we needed to close the border but not do anything to the millions of people who crossed illegally. Stop committing the crime, they say, but don’t punish anybody who already committed those crimes.
Logically, it makes little sense. But it’s not only about logic, is it? No, it’s about emotion, though that’s not all bad. Compassion for the sojourner is a Christian virtue. Yet we are — or should be — a nation of laws, and breaking laws comes with consequences. When you cross the border illegally, the legal consequence is deportation. The debate is over the conditions for forgoing that consequence.
Once a person has successfully evaded law enforcement for years, working as a dishwasher, hotel maid, or lawn guy, it gets harder to win public support for that consequence. That’s understandable and certainly not all bad, but it’s somewhat dissonant with the desire for a closed border.
Moreover, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had a major optics problem over the last year or so. Democrat sanctuary jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement, making ICE’s job much harder and more dangerous. Throw in some disobedient and violent protesters, and people get killed. Could ICE have done better? Definitely. But leftists lit the fire and stoked the flames specifically to discredit ICE.
It worked.
An interesting side note: On Friday, Trump tapped Stephen Miller to replace White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who resigned on Thursday. Miller is widely seen as the architect of the administration’s tough deportation policy. He’s also combative, calling the two U.S. citizens killed by ICE last year “domestic terrorists” and “would-be assassins.” That was overwrought and entirely unnecessary. In any case, his promotion signals that Trump won’t back off much. The CBS interview was recorded before the Miller announcement.
Immigration was far from the only topic Trump discussed in the interview.
On the economy, he opined, “I think it was bad messaging, maybe by me, but I would talk about it all the time.” He insisted “the numbers are phenomenal,” but “we couldn’t get the word across.” He’s right.
The war with Iran hurt the economy, especially gas prices, and Trump acknowledged that voters “didn’t like the war.” Still, he believes he acted correctly and in U.S. national interests: “I think historically, this will be a very good decision. Is it a good decision for today and tomorrow? Maybe not. But ... I have to go with what’s right for our country. ... If they had a nuclear weapon during my term, I would be excoriated far worse than what’s happened.” He’s right again.
“I’ve stopped them from having a nuclear weapon,” Trump added. “That’s a big thing.”
Where Trump started, however, was with himself. Asked for his analysis of the GOP’s “historic defeat,” Trump began, “Well, number one, I was not on the ballot.”
Actually, he kinda was. “You were out on the trail,” Douthat noted, “and you said, ‘Vote like I’m on the ballot.’”
If I had to sum up not just the interview but Trump’s second term so far, I’d say he frequently does the right thing but too often shoots himself in the foot with his rhetoric or the execution. His presidency isn’t over, but thanks to that truth and victorious Democrat opposition, it’s going to be tough sledding.
