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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6013 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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Let's get this thread rolling with something interesting. I happened to come across this clip on Twitter of a post-midterm interview with Trump, posted by America First Post. I'm just gonna transcribe the whole thing here:

Narrator: Whether it was the message, or the record, the Republican collapse will give Democrats in Congress new powers over budgets, hearings, and subpoenas.

Interviewer: You came out after the midterms, you congratulated the Democrats, you said you were open to working with them. What is one thing you would like to work with a Democratic majority on?

Trump: I'd love to do something on immigration.

Interviewer: What? Do you think immigration hurt you in the midterms? Do you think the crackdown hurt you?

Trump: I think it both helped and hurt. I got an A+ for closing up the border. I get very high marks for getting the bad ones out, but I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation or breaking of the law and that was that they came into the country illegally. Now, there is a large part of the country that think they should be put out and there is a large part of the country that think they should be allowed to stay if they're good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel or doing something right? And in some cases paying taxes. And there's a large group of people think that they should be allowed to stay.

Interviewer: So you think your deportation policy went too far? It was too tough.

Trump: I think it was too tough. I think it might be too tough yea.

Interviewer: What would happen? What does the deal look like with the Democrats?

Trump: Well, the deal would be we would work something out and I think it's something, I think that's something that's actually doable.

Interviewer: Doable to create some kind of legal status for the landscapers and the -?

Trump: Yea. When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that's worked there as a, you know, as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lot of good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden they're being taken out of the country it's tough. It's a tough thing. But there's a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody to connect.

Interviewer: Do any of those people work in your administration? Are they in the building with us right now?

Trump: No, no. Well, there are a lot of those people. Then there's also people that are more modified on that. In other words get the killers out, get all the rough ones out, get the drug dealers out but let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.

Interviewer: Do you think, the Democratic party right now, has people in it that are interested in this kind of deal?

Trump: I think so, yeah. People have already called me.

Interviewer: So I'll say, I saw James Talarico, the new Democratic senator from Texas. I saw him on Fox News and he said immigration was one of the things he wanted to work with the audience.

Trump: Others too, South Carolina said. Numerous people.

Interviewer: You did, in the course of the campaign, you did occasionally call him Talafreako.

Trump: Yea, I did.

Trump is Trump of course so take everything with a massive grain of salt, especially since he announced Stephen Miller would be taking over as his chief of staff, but this is crazy? Perhaps Trump's "Only Nixon can go to China" moment will be an Eisenhower-esque amnesty for illegals. I have heard other commentators suggest that Trump would be open to adding Puerto Rico and D.C. as states from a self-glorifying kind of way. "President Trump, you could be remembered as the first President to add states to the union since 1950! What a legacy!"

The immigration hawks gave us Texas bluer than New York. Zoomers speaking of 100 million deportations turned out 1.75 million non-voting but eligible Hispanics because they don't want their technically-illegal abuelita sent back.

And there is no benefit to deporting abuelita. Her three children and 10 grandchildren were born here, deporting her doesn't change their legal status. She doesn't have access to social security, if she didn't work for cash she probably doesn't know whose stolen ID she worked under- the company she worked for took care of all that. The only thing it does is make US citizens that zoomers Trump hired to be mean on twitter dislike for failing a paper bag test upset.

The immigration hawks gave us Texas bluer than New York

I'm not immediately convinced that Texas turned blue because of Trump's immigration policy. Texas strikes me as a state in which high gas prices would have gone over very badly, and then there is the national animus against the tariffs/inflation, perception of corruption/incompetence, etc. I understand that it is quite plausible that Texas' high Hispanic population and probably high Hispanic integration would make the immigration policy of "deporting abuelita" a very, very bitter pill, but I think that there is a need for evidence that it was this rather than the economy. (I am generally a Democrat voter and am very much not an ethnostatist desperately seeking copium to sustain my white nationalist dreams.)

Honestly, I think that immigration could have remained a winning issue if not for the administration's high degree of incompetence in carrying it out. As with DOGE, the implementation seemed more designed to send a vibes-based message against immigration rather than, for example, putting a higher priority on targeting gang members or other bad actors rather than abuelitas or upstanding non-citizens who are easy to find. It seems fairly clear to me (again, as a Dem voter) that there are some very big problems with welfare fraud among Somali refugees in Minnesota. This should have been a winning issue! Except... that Trump's solution and the seemingly incompetent ICE ended up with agents killing native-born white US citizens. They should have created the case for fraud against a daycare with quality paperwork, and then they could have booted the perpetrator with the state's, if not the local commnunity's, support. To me, ICE's inability to effectively/popularly carry out these policies is downstream of Trump's emphasis on loyalty above all else in his second administration, which has meant that even the potentially good ideas have been carried out poorly, and the bad ideas... well, yikes, tariffs and Iran.

Texas gas prices were much much lower than the rest of the country(in October they were only about $3.50/gal, on the high side of average rather than notably above it), and white nationalism was unusually prominent here because of Bo French. We also saw 1.8 million voters who'd never voted before(Texas has low voter turnout), most of whom were Hispanics voting for democrats.

I agree that deportations and a strict border policy are not necessarily losing issues... but the largest immigration crackdown in history which the admin allowed staffers to claim was aiming for 100 million deportations is. Running on ethnic cleansing is unpopular with basically everyone, but for obvious reasons much more so with minorities.

I seriously doubt there are even 100 million potential deportees! That is like 30% of the population.

Well yes, there shouldn't have been rhetoric about 100 million deportations. That's ethnic cleansing territory, not immigration crackdowns.

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