YOU MEAN THE ECONOMY ISN'T BETTER NOW THAT WE PUNISHED THE SCAPEGOAT?

For his podcast yesterday, Greg Sargent of The New Republic interviewed Will Saletan of The Bulwark. Here's Saletan trying to understand President Trump's poor poll numbers:

Saletan: ... So Greg, earlier you were reading from Trump’s Truth Social post where he talks about... complains about not getting credit for what he’s done on the economy. The other issue where he has complained a lot lately about not getting credit is immigration. He said, “I want to talk about immigration, but my staff won’t let me. They say, ‘Nobody cares about it.’” So the problem for Trump is that he did cut off people coming across the border. And instead of getting credit for that, Americans are like, Okay, what’s the next problem? That went away.

So he’s not getting the affirmative credit that he used to get from people who were really pissed off about that issue. But instead, what’s happening is the ICE raids are triggering all the negative reaction. Americans are seeing what it looks like when you send masked people out to pick people off the street in vans and take them away and ship them to foreign torture prisons, right? And this is not what they had in mind.

What Trump said in his speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, on Tusday was this:

Ten months ago, we inherited the worst border in the history of the world and now we have the strongest border in the history of our country. We've never had a border this -- And people don't talk about -- you notice, they don't talk about it. When I ran -- when I was running it was the biggest thing. And before I was running, that's all they talked about, the border, the border, the border and now I fixed it, nobody wants to talk about it. Even my people, they say, sir, don't put it in your speech.

Why, because nobody cares about the border. You fix -- No, but you know how bad that is? Because they forget what you did.

This is actually a riff Trump used in his 2024 campaign speeches -- see, for instance, this January 2024 speech in Las Vagas, or a March speech in Ohio. In those speeches, Trump said he closed the border so thoroughly in his first term that he was told nobody wanted to talk about it during the 2020 campaign, but in 2024 it was an issue again. Now he's grumpy because, he says, he's done such a great job no one wants to talk about it again.

But that's not how presidential accomplishments usually work. In 2012, Barack Obama fans had no problem cheering on the assertion that General Motors was alive and bin Laden was dead. So why the gloom about Trump's actions on immigration?

On the subject of the economy, we know why no one wants to give Trump credit: because the economy sucks. The Trump lament Sargent quotes earlier in the interview is from a Truth Social post:

When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening? When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?

He won't get credit, obviously, because the economy is awful. But why isn't the immigration crackdown making more people happy, when polls predicted strong support for a crackdown?

Maybe it's because the administration's tactics are brutal and disruptive -- but it could also be because many Americans thought that a crackdown on immigrants would be a key component of an economic turnaround. I think many of them thought they'd feel richer and less economically stressed as a result of the arrests and deportations.

According to the right's anti-immigration narrative, the targeted immigrants are all criminals and parasites. The ones who aren't rapists, psycho killers, and drug kingpins are bloodsuckers living on welfare (and getting benefits citizens don't get). But the administration's arrests have focused on workers; they're taking place at Home Depots, not welfare offices. I think many Americans thought a wave of deportations would improve the economic conditions of ordinary citizens automatically, because they've been told for years that all these people do is take, take, take. For reasons they don't understand, it's not working out that way.

Trump will keep promising paradise on earth as a result of his policies, and most voters will continue to be disappointed. Sadly, he might still retain the loyalty of 40% of the voting public, judging from the polls. But his simple redemies aren't working, and everyone else knows it now.