THE IMMIGRANT CRACKDOWN COULD BE THE EASY PART FOR TRUMP (Plus: Reasons to Hope We Never Get to That Point)

I don't know who'll win the election on Tuesday. Yesterday the forecasts turned against Kamala Harris again, although there are new state polls from Marist and CNN that look good for her. I'm pleased that Donald Trump and his supporters seem to be freaking out about Harris's lead among elderly early voters in Pennsylvania, about the fact that the early vote in skewing female by double digits in key states and skewing Democratic by large margins in those same states according to polls of early voters. I'm glad they're upset about that Julia Roberts ad urging women to vote Harris without telling their Trumpist husbands. And I'm encouraged by this report from Puck's Tara Palmeri about the talk in Trumpland:

... as the early results from Pennsylvania reveal an influx of first-time female voters who will likely break for Harris, a newfound anxiety is taking hold....

While [Trump's] inner circle feels confident about winning the Sunbelt, they recognize that they have a good chance of losing Michigan, where the gender gap is stark and students are coming out in record numbers. (A new CNN poll shows Harris up 5 points in the state.) So the situation in Pennsylvania—where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote—has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days.

... “They’re going so crazy here,” said a campaign source. “Anyone who hears how rabid they are about this issue can’t walk away from this and think they feel comfortable about where they’re at in PA. They’re talking about criminal referrals. They want to find poll watchers who they feel are engaged in voter suppression so that they can refer criminal prosecutions.”

I worry about Republican intimidation at polling places -- but why isn't it happening already? In some states, more than half of the expected electorate has already voted. Are these old men, Trump and Roger Stone and the rest, planning an Election Day intimidation campaign when, for their purposes, they should have been planning a pre-Election Day initimidation campaign? Did these creaky old bastards forget that it's not the 1980s anymore and people vote early now?

*****

But I think a Trump victory is quite possible, and I think Michelle Goldberg's "biggest fear" about a Trump presidency would happen right away:

My single biggest fear about a Trump restoration is that he keeps his promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” As The New York Times has reported, that would mean sending ICE to carry out “workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of unauthorized immigrants at once,” and warehousing them in a network of newly built prison camps.

But a Trump White House will be a strange mix of authoritarianism and incompetence. I assume that Trump, if he wins, will issue orders to start the immigrant roundup on January 20, and quite a few immigrants will be seized that day.

But then what? I think he'll be too incompetent to delay the process until he has someplace to put the detainees -- you can't build a detention camp in an afternoon -- so many of the first ones will be sitting on buses in handcuffs with nowhere to go. But all Trump will care about is getting footage of the raids. Either there'll be bodycam footage or cooperating law enforcement authorities will allow reporters to shoot video, the way they have for decades when they're planning showoffy SWAT raids.

This roundup will be vicious in some ways and inept in others. The most peaceful, law-abiding immigrants, including some who have had the legal right to live here, will be rounded up first. Among the first targets will be hard-working Haitian legal residents in Springfield, Ohio. In Aurora, Colorado, Trump will probably round up the people who aren't in gangs, while the gang members slip away because, y'know, they're criminals, which means they have some experience in evading capture.

The roundups will skip large portions of the undocumented immigrant population, partly because Trump and his authoritarian hacks won't do a careful job of assembling the goon army necessary to do the roundups clinically and efficiently, and partly because Trump will make it clear to employers that he'll spare their immigrant employees if they bribe him (which they will).

But the supporters of the crackdown won't mind. Remember, rank-and-file right-wingers believe in anecdotes, not data. Tell them about three violent crimes committed by immigrants and they believe we have an immigrant crime wave. They never think about the fact that Fox and Trump are highlighting every crime committed by immigrants and ignoring tens of thousands of crimes committed by people born in this country. If the anecdotes they hear are all biased one way, they'll believe that what they're being told demonstates a trend. And that's how they'll respond to news reports of immigrant roundups: They'll see a lot of footage of these roundups on Fox and think Trump is winning the war, even if he's rounding up far fewer immigrants than he promised.

And if eventually it becomes clear that the crackdown is failing to deport the number of immigrants Trump promised to deport, I suspect that won't hurt him. I always think of the parable of the two Bushes: George H.W. Bush sent troops to drive Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, succeeded in that mission, declared victory, withdrew the troops, and then lost reelection a year and a half later. George W. Bush went to war with Saddam, deposed him, occupied Iraq, then got stuck in a quagmire -- but he was still a "war president" when it was his turn to run for reelection, and he won. So I think Trump might actually benefit from failure in his immigrant crackdown, at least for a while. He'll be a "war president." His followers and many Americans in the middle will rally around him because the crackdown isn't happening efficiently. (We'll need to "stay the course.")

I'm not saying that Trump will be a popular president if he wins. I'm saying that this might be his best-tolerated outrageous act. He's much more likely to be resented for his inflationary economic policies, for cracking down further on abortion, and for other acts that will directly affect American citizens.

I think Goldberg is overestimating the popular outrage in response to the immigrant crackdown. She writes:

If this happens, there will almost certainly be large protests. And when they break out, it is not far-fetched to think Trump would order the military to violently suppress them; the generals now warning about a second Trump term say he wanted to do just that in the past.

I don't think there'll be large protests. When I imagine the response to this, I think of the response to the heavy-handed "law and order" police tactics of the 1980s and 1990s: White Americans who lived in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas overwhelmingly approved of the tactics, and even whites who lived in cities not far from the neighborhoods where the crackdowns took place largely shrugged them off. Stop-and-frisk and police brutality weren't happening in white neighborhoods. In Rudy Giuliani's two terms as mayor here in New York, the crackdowns didn't shock white people's consciences until cops instrumentally raped Abner Louima and killed Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond.

Will there be a violent crackdown on dissent as well as a violent crackdown on immigrants? To some extent, yes, and it will be ugly. But Trump is terrible at personnel and at organization in general -- will he be able to assemble multiple armies to commit multiple forms of repression? I don't think he can outsource this to the personnel operation of Project 2025, which is more focused on bureaucrats than brownshirts.

I think there'll be levels of disruption in a second Trump presidency that will be shocking to people who expected merely a tough boss who happens to pop off on social media a lot, but I think the immigrant crackdown could be less troubling to the public than we expect. If a second Trump presidency happens, I think public anger will be mostly based on economic and social issues -- renewed inflation, book banning, repression of sexual minorities in suburban schools with socially moderate-to-liberal parents, a further crackdown on abortion, the end of Obamacare and possibly Medicaid, with Medicare and Social Security also under attack. I think a meat ax taken to the federal budget by Elon Musk could leave school districts without lunches, flood victims without aid, roads in long-term disrepair. I expect issues like these to alienate Americans first. I wish we lived in a country where the immigrant crackdown would send millions into the streets and threaten Trump's presidency -- but I don't think it will work that way.