The Worst Part of Trump’s Big Bill Is Getting Almost No Attention
But a lot of the fiscal responsibility stuff that the Dems are most comfortable harping on seems frankly pedestrian in comparison to a massive expansion of Trump’s police—nay, military—state. Democrats clearly are still reeling from Trump’s victory, which convinced them that immigration is his most popular issue and thus their own weakest line of attack. The leadership’s strategy seems to be that the less they say about immigration, the better—which explains why they’ve been largely silent on the Los Angeles protests, as if waiting for some more politically advantageous news to emerge. If it were up to these leaders, the party would talk only about Medicaid cuts and egg prices every day.
Democrats are failing to grasp that, despite their minority power, they’re able to shape political opinion rather than simply responding to it. Their timid strategy on immigration also ignores two key facts. The first is that this is only tangentially about immigration. Immigration enforcement is just the pretext for, and the mechanism to execute, an autocratic power grab to crush civil society and democratic constraints, as we’re seeing now in Los Angeles. Democrats don’t even have to tease out this argument; officials in the administration reportedly are talking about using the resources provided by the legislation to make an L.A.-style assault happen in every oppositional blue city, a prospect Trump apparatchik Stephen Miller is practically frothing at the mouth over.
Second, Trump is not really that popular on immigration; he’s been underwater for a while and dropping fast, with a Quinnipiac poll of registered voters this past week putting him at 54 percent disapproval on immigration and 56 percent disapproval on deportations specifically, basically matching his terrible numbers on the economy. The public pushback and the panic from businesses that rely on immigrant workers has gotten so acute that the administration reportedly is ordering agents to cool off on raids in the agriculture and hospitality industries.
Trump’s supposed political strength on immigration is proving to be a weakness, and his bumbling deployments in L.A., which seem to be further sinking his popularity, are the perfect opportunity for Democratic leaders to drive the point home, in the process striking not only at the Big Ugly Bill but at Trump’s broader project to make himself look invincible. If they can associate the bill in Americans’ minds with images of armed, masked men racially profiling a U.S. citizen who’s minding his own business on the sidewalk and drawing their guns on a church pastor (after stuffing one of her parishioners into a black SUV), the bill is probably dead in the water.
