IS TRUMP ABOUT TO CHICKEN OUT ON ANTI-IMMIGRANT RACISM?

I didn't see this coming, though I suppose I should have:

Wait did he actually tweet this? Because this is like directly contradicting Stephen Miller.

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— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) June 12, 2025 at 10:33 AM

Yes, he really posted this at Truth Social. He actually acknowledged that undocumented workers are hard to replace (though I'm sure he made up the bit about criminals applying for the jobs) and said it would be better to focus on rounding up immigrants who've committed crimes.

This shouldn't be completely surprising because Trump has always listened intently to other old rich white guys, especially old rich white guys who, like him, are in real estate and hospitality, or are in industries familiar to Trump from the world of New York business. An April 2017 New York Times story about the people Trump turned to for advice listed quite a few people in this category: Carl Icahn, a famous New York real estate developer; Steve Roth, head of the New York real estate firm Vornado; Richard LeFrak, the son of a famous New York real estate developer; Stephen Schwarzmann, the CEO of the Blackstone Group; and so on. We should have realized that hospitality moguls would complain to Trump, as would agribusiness moguls, and he'd take the complaints seriously.

We also should have realized that Trump is so ignorant he didn't realize he'd be upsetting these corporate chieftains when he greenlighted Stephen Miller's "arrest them at work" strategy.

I believe Trump is also too ignorant to realize that the vast majority of immigrants he's targeted are hard workers rather than criminals -- Fox News has persuaded the rubes that nearly all of them are criminals, and Trump is one of those rubes. If Trump wants his administration to concentrate on rounding up murderers and gangbangers, he may learn, to his surprise, that locating dangerous criminals and building cases against them is difficult, dangerous, and time-consuming. He won't get his quick daily fix of arrests and deportations if his administration focuses on criminals.

So the administration will probably go right back to accusing every young male immigrant with a tattoo of being a gangbanger psychokiller. That seems the most likely direction in which the administration's policy will go, if there are real changes.

Trump might also be looking at polls showing his numbers dropping on immigration -- he's at 37% approval, 52% disapproval on immigration in a recent Washington Post survey, and he's at 43%/54% in a new Quinnipiac poll.

If we survive the Trump era and his presidency is generally seen as a failure, I warn you that right-wing propagandists will eventually tell us that Trumpian conservatism didn't fail -- Trump failed conservatism. During Elon Musk's anti-Trump temper tantrum, he lamented that the Trump/GOP Big Beautiful Bill would lead America "into debt slavery"; in the future, if Trump really does rein Stephen Miller in, we can expect immigration hard-liners to say that Trump wasn't tough enough on the undocumented, just as he wasn't tough enough on the debt. (Heaven forbid the GOP should raise taxes on rich people.)

Everyone on the right believes that right-wing radicalism can never fail -- it can only be failed. It's possible that Trump will go down in right-wing history as a president who failed the True Cause.