Transcript: Trump Threat to Occupy Cities Gets Scarier in Vile Fox Hit
Foser: It’s a fundamentally dishonest charade here. One of the things that we’re seeing is that the very same people who two and three months ago were writing pieces saying Democrats shouldn’t fall into the trap by opposing Donald Trump on immigration, he’s super popular on immigration.… Well, what actually happened was Trump’s approval on immigration and overall have dropped since then significantly because people did oppose him on it. And those pundits and those journalists have not revisited that. They’re not saying, Oh, I was wrong. Instead, they’re just running the same columns over again and swapping out the word “immigration” for the word “crime.”
Sargent: We are actually seeing what happens when Democrats do engage this debate. J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, as you highlighted in your piece and as a number of other people have highlighted, did this extraordinary response to Trump’s threats to occupy Chicago where he said, “I’m going to defend my people from you.” Cast Trump as the threat. The primary threat to the wellbeing of Illinois residents, Illinois constituents is Donald Trump, the president of the U.S., and J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor, will defend them from him. So there’s that. Then Gavin Newsom’s been pretty good on this as well. And we’re finally seeing that when Democrats do that, they break through. And we just spent the last six months since Trump won debating how Democrats break through the noise since Trump succeeded informationally in a way Democrats did not. And then when you see two Democrats actually breaking through the noise by doing this, by taking this issue on, all of a sudden nobody’s debating how you break through the noise anymore. Where does this end up going? Do Democrats get this right eventually or not?
Foser: I think they’ll end up getting it more right than not. And we’ve both talked a little bit about some of the frustrating comments from some Democratic strategists on this. I will say that I think overall the duck-and-cover thing is a little bit more of a pundit and journalist theme than it is something you hear directly from actually prominent Democrats. And Pritzker this week was a tremendous example—not only of how you can forcefully denounce this very authoritarian and very inappropriate behavior but the reception that you’ll get from that. There was this outpouring of support for them. I think if people are wondering what can they do, well, the biggest thing they can do is encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior. So if your local paper, the journalists you consume are peddling BS on this, call them out on it. If your elected officials are not standing up, urge them to do so. But when they are, people like J.B. Pritzker, express happiness about that. Politicians respond well to people responding well to the things that they do.
