President Donald Trump gave his base a shock Sunday, telling 60 Minutes he's having second thoughts about his hardball approach to immigration enforcement.
Asked how immigration affected the Republican Party's midterm performance, he told interviewer Ross Douthat, "I think I got an A-plus for closing up the border."
But then he said the verdict was mixed, adding: "I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that — that created one violation or breaking of the law: that was that they came into the country illegally."
"I think it might be too tough, yeah," he concluded when pressed by Douthat.
"That hurt me."
Yet two years ago, Trump's promises to reverse the flood of illegal immigration unleashed by Joe Biden helped him win reelection — and win every battleground state to boot.
And as dismal as last Tuesday's results were for the GOP, exit polls show voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats on immigration, 45% to 43%.
Republicans were a solid majority — 57% — of those who rated immigration enforcement "crucial" to how they voted.
Those core Republicans won't reward the president, or the party, for going weak.
But Trump sent another signal shortly after the midterms that ought to reassure immigration hawks when he announced Stephen Miller, a staunch restrictionist, would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff.
MAGA wasn't wiped out in last week's Democratic tsunami — just as Trump wasn't swept out of public life by the 2020 election.
He knows how to make a comeback, and that's what he's planning here.
But it's a dangerous gambit:
Trump wants to soften his image, and the Republican Party's, but he has to do it without capitulating to the Democrats, who have not changed a whit since the Biden years.
A smart strategy will be to put the Democrats on the defensive, forcing them to choose between American workers or the companies that employ cheap illegal labor.
If workplace immigration raids trigger bad publicity, there are gentler-seeming yet just as effective ways to go after the boardrooms instead, with high fines and indeed prison terms for executives who break the nation's immigration and labor laws.
The corporate crooks who profit from illegal immigration aren't so easily defended by the open-borders left, and if the administration goes after them, it will show voters who is really on the side of American workers — and who's in bed with big business.
Republicans win when they're the populist party, as Trump's reelection and last week's midterm debacle both illustrated: All the policies Republicans champion have to be framed in populist terms, and the party can't afford to be seen as corrupt or too tight with Big Tech.
The GOP also can't afford to seem cruel or racist, and despite what his enemies say about him, Trump has more often than not succeeded in talking about immigration enforcement in ways that appeal to citizens of all ethnic backgrounds.
Midterm voters had qualms about ICE's enforcement tactics, but Americans still want secure borders, and they want illegal immigrants who commit crimes to be the first to be deported.
The Trump administration can put productive pressure on the Democratic Congress, daring legislators to cut off the forms of enforcement that remain overwhelmingly popular.
Trump today is in the same position Bill Clinton was in after the 1994 midterms, when Democrats suffered an historic wipeout that cost them both the House and Senate.
Clinton looked like he'd be a dead man going into his 1996 reelection battle, but he outmaneuvered the new Republican Congress in the test of wills over the 1995 government shutdown, and voters gave him credit, too, for working with Republicans to pass welfare reform.
He was easily reelected.
Trump won't be on the ballot in 2028, but the Trump party will be. Republican chances in the next election heavily depend on what the president does from here on out.
He can't simply trust Democrats to make good on an immigration deal: Ronald Reagan learned that the hard way when he agreed to an amnesty in 1986 on the promise that Democrats in Congress would legislate stronger enforcement.
But Trump can force Congress to make hard choices between legal workers and lawbreaking employers, and he can speak in conciliatory tones even as he puts Democrats in a position of having to reveal their radicalism.
Immigration has always been a winning issue for Trump. Now he needs to make it one for his party as well.
Editor’s Note: Democrat politicians and their radical supporters will do everything they can to interfere with and threaten ICE agents enforcing our immigration laws.
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