Transcript: Trump’s Threats to Jail Foes Darken amid Brutal Poll Slide
Kurtz: Yeah, I guess I would say two things to that. One is that I think the investigations themselves are very bad and themselves corrupt because it’s an intimidation factor. It is a threat. It is a warning to others not to cross Trump. It is a notice to officials in the government now and former officials of what can happen to you if you don’t toe the line. And that is all in and of itself bad, toxic, undemocratic, and runs against the grain of the rule of law.
It can get worse, right, if there are actual charges brought that are bogus as I expect they would be, if there are cases brought that just don’t meet the normal standards—and I don’t know how they would meet the normal standards these days. It’s all broken down at Justice. And so anything that comes out of these investigations needs to be looked at with a high degree of skepticism, and it almost needs to be proven to be legit. And I don’t even know how they would do that, right? All the mechanisms that you would have in place, all the checks and balances, all the professionalism and soberness and careful application of prosecutorial discretion—all of that’s just out the window, Greg. So I think we’re left with this festering, toxic mess that’s going to persist for another three and a half years.
Sargent: So you’ve got this split screen I’m talking about here, David. You’ve got this type of thing, which is really meant to make Trump look formidable and terrifying. Don’t cross him. He’s at the peak of his power right now. On the other screen, he’s in really rough shape in the polls. A new Gallup poll finds that his approval rating on immigration is down to 35 percent, while 62 percent disapprove. And there’s been a surge in support for immigration generally: A record high 79 percent say it’s a good thing. David, given that this is supposed to be his strongest issue, I take it as a sign of serious underlying political weakness. And overall his approval is down, and the polling average is down to 44 percent or 52 percent disapproving. That’s a low point for him. What do you make of these numbers? He’s actually in pretty weak shape, isn’t he?
Kurtz: Yeah. I think the rubber’s starting to hit the road on some of these things, and it makes it harder for the public to suspend its disbelief about what he’s intending and what he’s promising, right?
Sargent: Yeah.
Kurtz: I think it’s easy to make pariahs of immigrants and undocumented people and people of color. And in the abstract, the mass communication authoritarian mode that he’s in, people respond to that. And in their own minds, it’s like, Well, he’s just talking about the worst of the worst. He’s just talking about criminals. He’s just talking about people that we wouldn’t want in our country in the first place. But then as they get into trying to hit their numbers for mass deportations, as they get into the nitty-gritty of actually implementing that plan, suddenly it’s people that don’t seem bad at all. It’s people that you know, it’s people that you work with, or it’s people that you know from church or what have you. And we’ve seen anecdotally … but maybe the polling reflects more than just individual anecdotes—that I think people are starting to see what this really means and the full extent of it. And so maybe there’s some pullback there and maybe some retrenchment about what the consequences of all this will really be.
