Transcript: Stephen Miller Rages at Low Arrests—and Wrecks a MAGA Scam

Sargent: I think Trump knows that he’s got a problem here as well with the ICE morale issue and with the unpopularity of what we’re talking about here. Trump’s been spending a lot of time tweeting out this crap about how ICE officers are getting attacked. His propagandists are pushing all these numbers about those supposed attacks on ICE officers, and the numbers just don’t add up. They’re all bullshit. The other day he said they’re under “daily violent assault,” right? The real victims in this country are ICE agents. This seems designed to help boost morale inside ICE, I guess, but it isn’t working clearly. I want to flag one other thing that an ICE officer said in The Atlantic piece. He said people are demoralized by the fact that they’re basically being turned into a “goon squad.” I got to think that a lot of these ICE officers didn’t quite think they signed up for going after carpenters and grandmothers. Todd, can you shed some light on this? To what degree are ICE officers in the grip of the same ideological fervor as Miller is? I tend to think they aren’t. Don’t most of them think of themselves as going after real bad guys? What’s the real story there?

Schulte: So I don’t want to get into pretending to know what’s in the hearts and minds of individuals—and I’m sure it varies a lot. What I will say is I think people should take very seriously the direction they’re getting from the very top of this administration, whether it’s the president; whether it’s comments [about] mass deportations continuing and expanding; whether it’s the vice president who said the core of the policies they’ve been trying to put forth are mass deportation; whether it is the videos that you’ve seen put out on social media that have quoted the prophet Isaiah and have shown immigration enforcement agents in what I can—it’s a family podcast, so I will refer to as a horrific hype video talking about how immigration enforcement is a type of biblical justice that they are inflicting upon American communities; or whether or not it’s like the memeification of the shackling of human beings. I think people should take [that] very seriously—whatever they think they signed up for, that is what they are being asked to do right now—and make their choices accordingly. And what I can say is what I see from the American public: [This] is incredibly unpopular and designed to provoke, which, I think we should talk about here, is what you see in different places now.

Sargent: That memeification of the shackling of human beings is really dark, and I just want to pick up on it for one second. They’re memeifying all sorts of different cruelties toward immigrants right now. They’re memeifying Kristi Noem getting all dressed up in some bizarre getup and posing in front of tattooed migrants in prison cells. They’re memeifying the frog-marching of migrants onto deportation planes. I think there’s a connection between that and the broader unpopularity you’re talking about here. For the MAGA movement, all this stuff is thrilling—these memes, right? They are in the grip of the same ideological fervor as Stephen Miller is. They believe the presence of undocumented immigrants in this country—their mere presence—is a civilizational emergency, a dire threat to the makeup of the country that they want. But the broader public doesn’t see it that way. The broader public sees them as grandmothers and carpenters and day laborers. The broader public doesn’t have a problem with their presence here, and that, to me, is the big schism between MAGA and the rest of the country on this that you see so disgustingly and glaringly illustrated with those awful memes. There’s no chance that your average swing voter thrills to those images. No chance at all, I think.

Schulte: I can’t agree more. And I also think it’s important to remember we have the advantage of knowing that Donald Trump was president before. When the president went forth with a plan to try to repeal DACA in 2017, the pushback was so broad and intense that the next day, he was like, Love the Dreamers. Congress, act! and he was doing TV shows [eating] Chinese food dinners, trying to say he was a big dealmaker. And that didn’t happen, but DACA remains today. When family separation happened at the border, the pushback was even more intense, and the president, to this day, will say he wants to avoid family separation. Now, families are being separated every day as a result of his actions, but I think the point of there’s a very serious and incredibly unpopular policy architecture that has evolved over many years to restrict immigration, to make life so miserable for immigrants that they choose to leave, and, quite frankly, to marginalize immigrants so much that it fuels this further demagoguery.… You take away status from people. You make it so they don’t have the ability to pay their rent. People are unstable. They’re going to come into contact with the criminal justice system. So you can justify not just ICE going out and taking people but state and local law enforcement and the National Guard having to do this stuff. These downward cycles and spirals they want to push people into to fuel a propaganda machine—and it’s important to call that out for what it is.