How Could Anyone Not Have Seen This Coming?
Many elites seem sincerely surprised that Trump's mass deportation is racist and indiscriminate
At two different events in Las Vegas over the last month, I heard two different locally influential people say the same very puzzling thing. They both really thought that Donald Trump was only going to go after criminals.
It’s weird to me, because I actually think Trump was pretty clear in the campaign that he was going to launch a massive, heavily militarized, record-breaking campaign of detention and expulsion. In fact, in May 2024 CNN noted that while Trump was vague about most issues, he seemed to have given far more thought to the specifics of his promise to deliver mass deportation. And he’s mostly following the plan.
Yet, this sentiment — that what Trump is doing to immigrants now is somehow different from what he campaigned on — is extremely widespread. The Internet is littered with stories of Trump voters who discovered this the hard way. Here’s one. Here’s another. And another.
I’m a bit more forgiving of average voters who made this mistake, up to a point. After all, the news media by and large did an awful job informing people what mass deportation would mean. Democrats worked as hard as they could to avoid engaging with the subject. Voting is a civic responsibility, so we shouldn’t completely absolve average voters, some of whom are still not connecting the dots. But when the supposed opposition party won’t even make the argument and reporters cover the issue only occasionally, voters might not have understood what they were voting for.
If you can’t find it within yourself to forgive average voters, please at least remember that there is a strategic reason to give a little grace to them. We all engage in wishful thinking in life, and no doubt a decisive chunk of voters did this with Trump last November. Maybe they should have known. But allowing folks to say, “Trump isn’t doing what he said he would do” allows them to save face and join the anti-MAGA coalition.
But I don’t give this grace to civic leaders, professional journalists, influencers and elected officials. How could so many of these folks have thought that Trump really was only going to deport gang members and murderers when at his nominating convention they passed around “Mass Deportation Now” signs?
It is true that Trump sometimes said that “we’re starting with the criminals.” But he was also promising millions of deportations. These were Trump’s dual promises: Record-breaking mass deportation, and focus on criminals. In the real world, you can’t do both. There just aren’t so many immigrants with serious criminal records. Here is a July 12 Associated Press article summarizing Trump’s promises, basically, to be a strict vegetarian and also to eat a lot of steak:
President Donald Trump has pledged to deport “the worst of the worst.” He frequently speaks at public appearances about the countless “dangerous criminals” — among them murderers, rapists and child predators — from around the world he says entered the U.S. illegally under the Biden administration. He promises to expel millions of migrants in the largest deportation program in American history to protect law-abiding citizens from the violent threats he says they pose.
The mystery then is how people who think of themselves as well informed could have convinced themselves that only the promise to deport criminals was real? That he wasn’t serious about mass deportation. There are, roughly, three explanations.
1. Elites Who Don’t Deserve To Be Elite
One simple explanation is that some civic opinion leaders — despite bearing a responsibility to be better informed — actually don’t know much more than the average voters. They don’t read up on actual immigration policy. They don’t check the data. They get to go on more radio shows than the average voter, but they don’t actually know more.
Which is to say, some elites may have tuned out Trump’s most menacing campaign promises because they really wanted to believe that he was a legitimate choice. Biden and Harris were lame, and didn’t the stock market love Trump the last time? Wishful thinking comes for us all.
2. The Savvy Observers Who Aren’t Very Savvy
A variation on #1.
A lot of high status people who want to hold themselves out as non-partisan and yet knowledgable about politics adopt the savvy style in political commentary. A person adopting this style presents, on the one hand, cynicism: Politics is a game, you know, and no one is straight forward. And on the other hand: A claim to insight: I understand the game, and I can tell you the truth about what the politicians are really doing. I know how the game is really played.
The key is: You don’t actually have to be savvy to adopt the savvy style. A person who acts both cynical and knowing can become popular for media as an interview subject precisely because they sound like an independent truth teller. Mix in a little wishful thinking, and such a savvy person could tell you confidently in 2024 that Trump doesn’t really mean it about mass deportation. He just talks big, ya know. He’s gotta satisfy his base, is all. And we need a course correction from Biden, amirite?
Of course, that didn’t turn out to be correct. But, remember, actually being savvy isn’t important. What matters for the savvy style is adopting the pose and getting invited to speak on another podcast.
3. Some People Are Blind to Trump’s Racism
Remember, in the real world you cannot do a mass deportation of millions of immigrants and also only target serious criminals. Everyone should have realized that. In fact, the savvy observer might say, Trump himself must have known that he couldn’t pursue both goals. Thus, he must be just playing the Game of Politics (see #2), which means that we don’t need to worry about him trying to do a real mass deportation.
Unless.
What if … hear me out, this will sound nuts at first … but think about it … What if Trump is a racist?
Trump’s dual promises on immigration are actually reconcilable in an imaginary racist world. If you assume that immigrants are all criminals, it makes total sense. Mass deportation and going after criminals would be the same thing. I think there’s good reason to think that Trump himself sincerely believes this. That’s the whole gist of his Hannibal Lecter riff, that immigrants are basically cannibals or pet-eaters.
The question here is why didn’t savvy people who are less overtly racist than Trump understand that he was serious about mass deportation? Why didn’t they understand his racism, and that racism was the glue that held his untenable promises together?
There are at least two reasons. The first is back to wishful thinking. Some people desperately wanted to vote against Biden/Harris, and they really believed Trump would bring down prices or at least government regulation or whatever. If he’s a racist planning an ethnic cleansing of the United States, then it becomes immoral to vote for him. And that’s frustrating! But if we convince ourselves that he really doesn’t mean it, then we can indulge the desire to believe Trump is a legitimate alternative. Eggs were really expensive, right?
The second is a problem in political journalism, much of which is rooted in a both-sides-have-a-valid-point framework. This works fine if, say, Mitt Romney and Elizabeth Warren are debating raising the minimum wage. “Republicans say that raising the minimum wage will stifle job creation, while Democrats say it will protect living standards and boost consumer demand.” Let the people decide. Fine.
But you can’t use this framework if one side is in the habit of parroting Adolf Hitler’s talking points. “The Republican candidate says that immigrants are animals. Immigrant rights activists say no the f—-k they are not.” It doesn’t work. For political reporters to stay in their comfort zone, it’s better not to focus on the racism as much as possible, even when it is the most obvious explanation for policy. Which means not taking the racist seriously when he says, over and over, that he plans to do things like break the deportation record set by Operation Wetback.
Which means that only in the last few weeks or months has it started to dawn on many people: He was serious.