Half The Voters Say They Want To Elect Trump— Do You Know Any Of Them Well Enough To Diagnose Them?

I know I keep writing about it; I can’t help myself. It’s our neighbors and relatives who are the problem, at least as much as Trump and his cronies and Republican Party enablers. Are they stupid? Evil? A little of both? A lot of both? As many of them are going to vote for Trump as against him. And by “them” alas, I mean “us.”

Every time I hear about another Trump outrage, I think about how much these people stick with him. 74,223,975 people voted for him in 2020, 46.8% of that year’s electorate. Turnout was 66.6%, much higher than in 2020, 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 1996, 1992, 1988… The last time any election beat that was when McKinley beat William Jennings Bryan in 1900 (73.7%) and 1896 (79.6%). 74 million of our neighbors and co-workers, friends, relatives… How is it remotely possible?

I don’t know if David Frum is still a Republican or not, but he’s certainly not a Trumpist. Yesterday he wrote that Señor T “says something crazy or vicious almost every time he speaks. It’s his nature, but it’s also a political strategy. The flow of half-demented, half-depraved talk energizes those who enjoy it— and exhausts those who are horrified by it.” Oh, my God! My sister? The guy down the street with the big Trump flag hanging from his verandah? They love him for the cruelty, not despite it.

“The mainstream media,” wrote Frum, “cannot report every outrageous remark, or they would do nothing else. Even those shocking comments that do get reported tend to make just a blip. The next day, if not the next minute, Trump is telling another lie or vilifying another public servant or issuing another threat. Yesterday’s shocker is soon crushed beneath today’s, and then tomorrow’s, until it’s ancient history. At a campaign rally in Wisconsin yesterday, Trump talked about his plans for “mass deportation” of border-crossers. ‘In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state,’ he claimed, presumably alluding to reports of gang activity in an apartment building in a Denver suburb. ‘And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should never have been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.’”

What did Trump mean by bloody story? He often fantasizes about unleashing state violence against groups and people he dislikes. Speaking to New York City cops in 2017, then-President Trump crowed about how “rough” immigration officers are and urged the police, “Please don’t be too nice” when making arrests. During the protests and riots of summer 2020, Trump similarly demanded that police “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out of” demonstrators. “Just shoot them,” he repeated again and again at meetings attended by top officials, according to a book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender. And in 2023, Trump suggested on Truth Social that  Mark Milley, Trump’s own former top general, deserved the death penalty. (Trump was angry because of a report in this magazine that Milley had assured Chinese military leaders in October 2020 that Trump was not going to order a sneak attack to justify keeping power after his impending election defeat.)

Trump’s first term really did see brutal and even deadly repression of illegal border-crossers, as my colleague Caitlin Dickerson has heart-rendingly reported. But Trump’s rhetorical eagerness for harm or hurt usually does not translate into real-world action. Mass deportation, in particular, has always been a dark and improbable fantasy. To round up and detain 150,000 people of Japanese descent in 1942 required dozens of assembly points and 10 full-scale internment camps operated by a specialized government agency. Trump is imagining a much more ambitious project— one that would surveil, arrest, and imprison many more people, extend across the whole country, and be followed by mass expulsions to other nations. Congress would have to rewrite laws to do away with the protections that today impede deportation, and would have to appropriate billions of dollars to pay for many more immigration officers and many more holding cells. Aircraft would have to be chartered to transport the deportees to their destinations. Diplomatic pressure would have to be applied to half the world to accept the returnees, many of whom come from collapsed states like Venezuela and Haiti or uncooperative ones like China and Russia.

Bottom line: It’s not going to happen. In office and out, Trump has often amended his immigration views to accommodate political reality and to placate wealthy business supporters. If he’s returned to power in 2024, there’s every reason to think he’d do it again. Before the coronavirus pandemic scrambled the numbers, the Trump administration actually removed fewer illegal immigrants from the interior of the country than the Obama administration before it.

Any real plan to enforce immigration would focus on the workplace. As a candidate for president in 2012, Mitt Romney argued that requiring employers to verify their workers’ immigration status would take away the incentive to immigrate illegally. Romney described his policy as “self-deportation”: “The illegal immigrants would themselves decide they can do better by going home, because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so we’re not going to round people up.”

Trump’s “bloody story” talk is not a guide to what a hypothetical future Trump administration would do. A future Trump administration will be a chaos of constitutional and foreign-policy crises, incapable of any kind of considered or consistent domestic policy. Bloody story is instead a revelation about how Trump feels— and a troubling reminder of the sources of his appeal. Real-world enforcement implies real costs. Labor would become more scarce. Immigrant-dependent services would become more expensive. The roofing industry, for example, now relies heavily on the most recent immigrants, so housing would cost more. Trump never accepts trade-offs. He deals in lies and delusions, such as financing child care through supposedly free money from magic tariffs that somehow protect U.S. industry without costing U.S. consumers anything.

Above all, Trump traffics in yearnings for punishment of people he regards as outsiders and inferiors. They will suffer, they will shed blood, they will pay— and somehow their pain and their loss will elevate and empower him and those who support him. It’s never true, but for a moment it feels good. What more vivid form of power is there than the power to inflict pain?

And his— and his supporters’— animus doesn’t stop with illegal border crossers. Yesterday, Victor Juhasz reported how Trump wanted to see bodies of gang members and drug lords “piled in the streets.” I suspect a lot of people agree, more or less, with the sentiment. “[H]e sought a series of mass executions— with firing squads and gallows, and certainly without the quaintness of an appeals process— to send a chilling message about the scope of his power... ‘Fucking kill them all,’ Trump would say. ‘An eye for an eye.’ Other times he’d snap at his staff: ‘You just got to kill these people.’ Invoking the brutality of dictatorial regimes that Trump wanted to emulate, he’d add, ‘Other countries do it all the time… They need to be eradicated, not jailed.’”

Juhasz posits that Trump, who “has positioned himself as an avatar of a collective revenge fantasy for his followers… seeks seeks autocratic power to implement his draconian immigration policies, including starting ‘the largest domestic deportation operation’ in U.S. history and reinstating the Muslim travel ban. He’s called for ending the constitutional right of birthright citizenship with an ‘executive order’— a notion backed by Vance. Trump also seeks to remake American energy policy to benefit the fossil-fuel industry, a plan he shorthands as ‘drill, drill, drill.’ And he’s put criminal justice on the agenda, vowing to free the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, calling them ‘hostages’ and vowing to ‘sign their pardons or commutations on Day One.’ For those who have studied the rise of authoritarian leaders throughout history, the playbook of Trump and his allies dictates they will push through as many new laws, executive decrees, and emergency orders as possible before anyone understands what is happening. ‘They want to have a blitzkrieg— and then all you need to be is a dictator for a day,’ says Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall and a professor at New York University. ‘It’s not just a change of methods, it’s a change of political system— a vast expansion of the powers of the executive, so that Trump will be able to rule as an autocrat.’”

Trump’s enemy list continues to grow, including prosecutors who’ve brought criminal and civil charges against him. Indeed, lawyers close to Trump and his inner circle have spent more than a year researching obscure elements of the criminal code, seeking novel ways to criminally charge such officials in retaliation. There’s no nemesis too small. The tally even includes late-night comics who’ve pissed him off. As president, Trump briefly attempted to get Justice officials to twist campaign finance laws and the federal equal-time rule to declare that anti-Trump material broadcast by Saturday Night Live, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others was somehow illegal. During his 2024 campaign, according to a source with direct knowledge, Trump has raised this topic again, venting about the need to punish late-night comedians for giving “illegal” campaign contributions to the Democratic Party— in the form of jokes and on-air satire.