He’s flummoxed because he’s outsourced this policy completely to Miller and he knows it looks bad. Axios had this, this morning:
President Trump’s team recently reviewed private GOP polling that showed support for his immigration policies falling. The results, reflected in public surveys, bolstered internal concern about the administration’s confrontational enforcement tactics.
- Now, as the chaotic scenes from Minnesota play out around the clock on TV and social media, Axios has learned that some Trump advisers quietly are talking about “recalibrating” the White House’s approach — though it’s unclear what changes Trump would embrace, if any.
Why it matters: The worries in part of Trump’s brain trust are the first signs of internal second-guessing of his controversial ICE enforcement tactics.
- The private polling suggested a rupturing of the coalition of independent, moderate and minority voters who were key parts of Trump’s victory in 2024. Such voters will play a big role in determining whether Republicans keep their slim House majority in November’s midterms.
- If Republicans lose the House, Trump will head into his final two years in office as a lame duck who, he acknowledges, could face a third impeachment.
To the degree they support a more constrained approach, some advisers are playing to the president’s occasional misgivings about the optics of some ICE tactics.
- “I wouldn’t say he’s concerned about the policy,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “He wants deportations. He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”
- “… [T]here’s the right way to do this. And this doesn’t look like the right way to a lot of people.”
Several Republicans in Congress have expressed concern to the White House about how the raids are playing out, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
- ICE’s aggressive tactics are dominating the news and obscuring the White House’s work on cost-of-living issues that congressional Republicans, Trump and his team see as more important.
The internal GOP polling that alarmed some Trump insiders was completed at the end of December, days before an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.
- 60% of independent voters and 58% of undecided voters said Trump was “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants, the poll viewed by Trump’s team found.
- 33% said Trump was primarily deporting law-abiding people, as opposed to criminals.
You can tell by the way he’s answered questions in the recent interviews that he’s aware this looks bad. He personally loves the strong arm tactics, of course, he’s just leery of the optics which he knows a lot of people (not MAGA but others) really don’t like to see. He actually likes to see himself as a caring, empathetic person, which is absurd of course, but he’s
The polling out today from CNN, AP, and the rest are all showing him cratering on this issue. The MAGA faithful are fine with it, naturally. They are the folks who love to see their people getting violent, whether it’s the J6 insurrectionists or the ICE thugs. Apparently, the rest of the country still has a core of decency and doesn’t care for it.
By the way, the third impeachment is a must. I don’t see how the Democrats can not do it considering what he’s already done. No, he won’t be convicted but at this point I think that is an indictment of the GOP and it’s excellent politics. If we survive this, Trump’s legacy which is all he cares about now, will not be his ballroom or “the arch” or any of the things he’s slapped his hideous logo on. It will be that he was a criminal who almost destroyed the country and the world. He will instead join the pantheon of villainous leaders and Democrats should help that along by impeaching him a third time.