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The time when Trump sabotaged immigration restrictions, and the alt-right cheered
I’ve long held that most of politics is overwhelmingly dominated by some combination of 1) direct self-interest, and 2) vibes. Any notions of ideological consistency should be regarded as mere “happy accidents” rather than the norm. In the US, this issue cuts roughly equally across both parties. One particularly stark example happened a few months ago with immigration. In short, Trump sabotaged the most conservative immigration reform bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. This directly contradicts what many of his more hardline alt-right supporters want, yet instead of punishing him for doing this, they actively cheered him on. They simply like Trump’s vibes far more than they like Biden’s vibes, so they convinced themselves that the bill was akin to “surrender” through extremely strained logic.
This episode is rapidly fading from public memory given that the bill didn’t pass, but it’s such a great encapsulation of vibes-based motivated reasoning that I feel it should be highlighted before it’s forgotten completely.
Illegal immigration so far
The chart here shows migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border. While some slip through the cracks and are not counted, this still gives a good sense of the contours of illegal immigration over the past few presidential administrations.
Migrant numbers were quite high during the Bush years, with yearly peaks corresponding to agricultural labor needs.
Obama was quite hawkish on illegal immigration. Numbers were already decreasing from the Bush years, and the economic turmoil from the GFC brought numbers down further. Importantly though, Obama’s enforcement was instrumental in keeping numbers down even as the economy recovered.
Illegal immigration fell to its lowest point at the beginning of Trump’s term, but rapidly increased after that to meeting, then exceeding the numbers under Obama. Numbers crashed again at the onset of COVID.
Illegal immigration has exploded after Biden took office.
There are a couple of points worth noting here. The first is that while enforcement has an undeniable impact on illegal immigration numbers, exogenous factors should also be considered. Periods of economic prosperity in the US act as a “pull” for migrants, while recessions do the opposite. Likewise, civil turmoil in immigrant-sending countries can act as a “push” for migrants, while relative stability again does the opposite. That peak in May 2019 under Trump was due in part to a period of turbulence in Northern Triangle countries.
The second point worth noting is that Trump wasn’t really much better than Obama in countering illegal immigration, contrary to popular belief. This point deserves some elaboration.
Trump and Biden’s border policies
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, immigration was frequently at the forefront despite the historical lows of illegal immigrant activity. Upon ascending to the presidency, Trump at least tried to keep his promise. He signed the infamous “Muslim Ban” in his first week, suspending entry for citizens from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days. He would continue with additional policies throughout his presidency, including preventing sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants, phasing out DACA, implementing a zero-tolerance policy and family separation at the border, creating new restrictions for who could apply for asylum, and many others.
The problem with all of these was that they were executive orders. Executive orders require less political capital to implement since they don’t have to go through congress, but they’re far more brittle and subject to legal challenges or revocation when a president of a different party comes to power. Indeed, practically all of Trump’s EO’s on immigration faced stiff legal hurdles. The Muslim Ban was rejected by courts twice, and only a watered down version passed on the third attempt. The family separation policy and restrictions on asylum were similarly watered down heavily. The policies on sanctuary cities and the phaseout of DACA were basically killed entirely.
Another issue with Trump’s implementation is that it was done with little tact. Any sort of reform will encounter pushback, with bigger changes tending to lead to more of a backlash. This can be mollified somewhat by a good PR campaign. Indeed, the ability to push through substantial reforms without angering huge swathes of the country can be seen as one of the key skills of a successful politicians. Trump and his team did not do a very good job of this. Few efforts were made to get buy-in from moderates. Instead, Trump’s modus operandi was typically controversial unilateral action, followed by doubling down with rhetoric like “shithole countries” that may have flattered his base, but was very poorly received among Democrats and independents. Trump had this problem in many more areas than just immigration, as Scott Alexander noted in 2018.
The end result was that while Trump certainly talked up his immigration policies as successes, most of them were little more than PR stunts. Illegal immigration surged substantially every year for the first three years of his presidency and peaked in 2019 at a level far higher than what Obama ever had. Likewise, legal immigration measured by the number of lawful permanent residents added per year was basically the same as during Obama’s presidency, only dipping substantially in 2020 with the onset of COVID. Furthermore, all of the hostile rhetoric Trump used created a backlash that (at least partially) helped propel Biden to the White House in 2020, and ensured he had a clear mandate to roll back Trump’s policies.
And that’s exactly what Biden did. In his first day in office, he axed the majority of Trump’s executive orders with the stroke of a pen. The first 100 days of Biden’s presidency were defined by “undoing Trump” in practically every area, and in terms of immigration that meant less hostility, fewer rules, and a more welcoming attitude. Cracks began to show almost immediately as illegal immigration soared, and then kept soaring month after month. It surpassed Trump’s worst month, and then kept climbing even higher before settling at a rate unseen in at least the past 3 administrations. December 2023 marked the worst month at nearly 250K encounters, with several preceding months having >200K encounters. For reference, Obama’s second term only saw a brief period above 50K encounters before declining to a steady-state of around 30K-40K encounters.
This rapidly became a political liability for Biden. Despite deploying Kamala Harris with her infamous “do not come” speech, illegal immigration kept increasing and Biden seemed helpless to address it, effectively getting himself caught between a rock (giving fodder to Republicans) and a hard place (alienating his base, reneging on promises, etc.). Ominously, things only seemed to be getting worse. Biden tried to use Trump-era COVID restrictions to limit some immigration through Title 42, but COVID couldn’t be used as a justification forever. What’s more, Biden’s actions significantly worsened a loophole in the system through abuse of a particular asylum designation. This article discusses it in detail. To summarize:
When the DHS encounters an illegal immigrant, it has two options: standard removal, or expedited removal.
Standard removal requires a court case with lawyers present to give evidence, while expedited removal is a streamlined, unreviewable process meant to reduce the burden on the DHS and the court system.
Illegal immigrants can indicate they intend to apply for asylum by establishing “credible fear”. While the threshold to asylum is fairly high, the “credible fear” threshold is very low, which at least starts the process towards asylum and thereby prevents use of expedited removal.
While standard removal is ongoing, the US has 3 options for where to keep them: (1) Parole them out into the US, (2) keep them in ICE detention centers, or (3) kick them back to the country from which they entered from, i.e. Mexico.
Obama did (1), but apparently the loophole wasn’t well-known enough to be a huge issue yet. Trump tried to go after asylum directly, but those efforts mostly fizzled in court. He then tried to do (2), but this caused a huge overcrowding problem as detention centers weren’t built big enough to accommodate the huge influx. After some bad press, he tried to do (3), which sort of worked when courts weren’t throwing spanners into the works, which they did frequently. Biden reverted back to (1), but now it was well-known that you could come to America illegally, utter the magic words “credible fear”, and you’d be let out into the community. Some derisively referred to this as “catch and release”. From this point, some immigrants simply didn’t show up to their court hearing, while others received court dates so far in the future (up to a decade or longer in some cases) that it didn’t matter. This became a vicious cycle, as more immigrants abused this loophole it clogged the courts further and further making the loophole more effective, which further incentivized anyone who wanted to come to the US to give it a try due to this One Crazy Trick ICE Doesn’t Want You To Know About.
The Senate compromise deal
After a few years of spiraling migration problems, it became clear that the center could not hold. Biden capitulated and signaled that he was willing to give concessions to Republicans to get immigration back under control. This willingness coalesced around the same time that an important foreign aid package was being discussed, with some Republicans stretching credulity a bit when they claimed that illegal immigration was functionally indistinguishable from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the idea of a “compromise” bill was born, where Biden would give in to Republican demands on immigration in order to get his foreign aid passed. This came to the fore in late January and early February of 2024.
You can read the full text of the bill here, but non-lawyers trying to read actual bills written in thick legalese is like trying decipher jabberwocky growls. A much more scrutable summary is available here.
Division A is all about the foreign aid. This chunk would eventually be passed in April in a standalone vote.
Division B is the immigration part. This was primarily negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Notably, this would have been the first major immigration reform bill (NOT executive order!) passed since Reagan. Everything else since then has been done through unilateral presidential action or the courts. Since this would have had the backing of Congress, its provisions were quite sweeping compared to the piecemeal efforts that came before. It:
Includes billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, including money for detention centers, 2700 new border agents, asylum case officers to break the vicious cycle, deportation flights, etc. It’s hard to understate how much money this bill would have ladled on to border protections, with the biggest increases going to the usual agencies like ICE and CBP, with smaller chunks going to ones that I wasn’t even aware were part of border enforcement, like FEMA and the US Marshals Service. It also gives case officers a permanent 15% raise over the standard GS schedule of government pay.
Gives a bit of money to USAID for stanching immigration at its source, in the Northern Triangle countries and elsewhere.
Restarts and funds building of Trump’s wall, which Biden canceled early in his presidency.
Modernizes border infrastructure generally, such as adding more sophisticated monitoring equipment and accepting fingerprint cards or biometric submissions for use in immigrant processing. You know, things that would be nice to have given the last major immigration bill is almost 40 years old at this point.
Raises the threshold on “credible fear” substantially to actually close the loophole. Currently, credible fear is evaluated using the lower “significant possibility” standard.
Raises the threshold on asylum generally even after they pass the first hurdle, and it funnels as many cases as possible into the expedited removal process.
Ends “Catch and Release” and formalize the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Those who arrive at ports of entry are placed under government surveillance, while those who arrive between ports of entry are detained outright, with funding provided for new detainment beds.
Establishes an additional asylum bar if there are reasonable grounds to believe an individual could have internally relocated in their country of origin or country of last habitual residence, in lieu of seeking protection in the United States.
Creates a Border Emergency Authority, a “break in case of emergency” power if the border became overwhelmed. This requires the DHS to ignore all asylum requests except those that fall under the Convention Against Torture, which has a high bar. It also further streamlined the expulsion process, allowing for immediate deportation in a range of scenarios. There was to be no public notification for this authority to be enacted, so an immigrant arriving would never be sure if it was active or not. This is the closest the US would come to “closing the border” for an extended period of time that wasn’t due to a national emergency like what happened after the JFK assassination or 9/11. To prevent this emergency tool from simply becoming the new normal, the Authority could only be activated if border encounters exceeded 4000 over a 7 day period. Conversely, it also prevents abuse in the other direction, i.e. a president deciding never to activate it, as it would be required if there were 5000 border encounters over a 7 day period. Note that border encounters were far higher than 5000 when the bill was being debated, so Biden would have had no choice on the matter.
Does NOT include any significant amnesty, even for DREAMers. Almost every serious attempt at reforming immigration had previously settled on the compromise of amnesty for current illegal immigrants in return for enforcement at the border. The most recent major attempt at immigration reform under the Gang of Eight did exactly this. Trump himself acknowledged this political reality in his first State of the Union address in 2018 when he came out in favor of giving amnesty for DREAMers. The fact that this is nowhere to be found in this bill is a significant implicit concession.
There are also a handful of concessions to the Democrats:
Allows processing and conditional permanent residence for Afghan collaborators.
Authorizes an additional 50,000 immigrant visas each year for the next five fiscal years.
Establishes a carveout in some of the rules above for unaccompanied minors, which in 2024 have made up <5% of all encounters.
The Border Emergency Authority requires a lower limit of 4000 encounters per day as discussed above, so a future Republican president wouldn’t be able to use it as the new normal unless there was an actual emergency. It also sunsets after 3 years unless renewed.
Republicans likely wanted restrictions on all asylum claims, but Dems kept a carveout for the Convention Against Torture.
Those concessions are really tiny. The last 3 bullet points are just minor restrictions on the new powers that would be in place. Only the first 2 bullet points are concessions in any meaningful sense. Helping Afghans who collaborated with the US is a one-off now that the war is over, and is a good idea since the US doesn’t want to get a reputation of abandoning those who help it. The 50K new legal immigrants a year is time-limited to 5 years, and is much, much less than the status quo of 200k+ illegal immigrants per month that is happening now. Heck, it would have only been 2-3 months worth of illegal immigrants encountered under average Trump or Obama years, so it’s a very small price to pay.
The bill received endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, endorsed the proposal and said it would drop illegal border crossings nationwide. The group in 2020 endorsed in Trump and has been highly critical of Biden’s border policies.
It’s also interesting to compare this bill to the Border Coalition Letter that was submitted to Congress in 2022. This letter was sent on behalf of a bunch of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Conservative Partnership Institute, and several that I’ve never heard of, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the SPLC classifies as a hate group. The letter demanded exclusion of amnesty of any type, creating an Authority to immediately expel illegal immigrants, increase restrictions on asylum, mandate resources for the border wall, increase funding for the CBP and ICE, end the abuse of parole authority. The bill shares a striking resemblance to this letter. Granted, it doesn’t do everything, as there are a few carveouts for stuff like asylum under the Convention Against Torture, and the letter also asks for states to overrule the federal government when it comes to border enforcement (something that Texas has been motioning towards recently). But overall, the bill does the vast majority of what was asked for by some of the most conservative immigration groups in the country.
Trump swoops in
So yeah. Trump blew it all up.
The reason he did this was as obvious as it was cynical: he didn’t want Biden to have a “win” on the issue. He wanted to keep the issue in the news as a liability for Biden so he would have a greater chance at winning in November. He didn’t exactly keep his motivations secret. Nor was this the first border bill that Trump sabotaged. The overturning of Roe v Wade is instructive here, as it was a major “dog catches the car” moment. Republicans loved to campaign on restricting abortion, but when the Supreme Court actually handed them the chance to do so, they quickly realized the costs it would entail. What had once been a rallying cry for conservatives turned into a liability, and now the Democrats have the wind at their back on the issue. Why do the same for immigration by actually enacting favorable policies?
Of course, it’s not helpful to be openly cynical to your supporters, so the official reason that Trump, Gaetz, and many others trotted out to oppose the bill related to the Border Emergency Authority. In essence, they boiled the entire bill down to that upper limit threshold of 5000 illegal immigrants per day. The extra enforcement, the money for border agents, the restarting of the wall construction, the closing of the asylum loophole, the end of Catch and Release? None of that mattered. It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
Obviously the bill isn’t perfect. There are legitimate criticisms that could be levied. For instance, Republicans could say that Democrats shouldn’t get any new legal immigration in exchange for fixing the law, even the paltry 50K number that the bill would mandate. But actually analyzing the bill to any serious degree would quickly show how conservative it is, so Republican leaders mischaracterized the bill so heavily that I’d say most reasonable people would classify it as “outright lying”.
In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.
There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file. Trump’s uncompromising vibes in 2016 is a large part of what won him the Republican primary. He sustained those vibes through his presidency with his bombastic executive orders that drove news headlines but did little to fix the underlying issues. Trump used those vibes again to kill this bill, as all he had to do was vaguely point to the 5000 number in the bill, imply that was a concession, and the bill was effectively dead no matter what it actually would have done.
Other concerns with the bill
While the misrepresenting the 5000 number in regards to the Border Emergency Authority was the most frequent criticism by far, there were a couple other, less goofy criticisms that deserve examining.
The first is that Biden already had the tools to solve the border crisis, and therefore this bill wasn’t necessary. This is typically paired with vibey “Republicans cooperate, Democrats defect” arguments that I detailed in the previous section, i.e. that the bill must have been a “trap” of some sort. Vibes aside, there is some degree of truth to this. As we saw earlier in this article, Biden’s policies were indeed principally responsible for the recent explosion in illegal immigration. Probably the clearest remedy would be reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy that has been shambling along, half dead. Biden attempted to kill this policy early in his presidency, and courts initially agreed he could do so, until they didn’t, so the policy is technically still alive. Reimplementing this would take at least some of the wind out of the vicious cycle in regards to the asylum loophole, although there would still be the omnipresent specter of legal threats, and now Mexico has said it will refuse to cooperate.
The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.
Another criticism that was sometimes levied is that Republicans should simply hold out for Trump to become president to truly fix immigration. Again, this typically came packaged with vibey concerns that any deal with Democrats must necessarily imply some ratcheting of concessions, and thus the only way to address the issue is unilateral Republican action, headed by a true-believer like Trump. To steelman this idea, the idea that the political capital to solve illegal immigration would evaporate if the issue was successfully mitigated is a sound one. Democrats were only willing to come to the table in the first place due to the extremely tenuous position they found themselves in with the surge of illegal immigration. This bill almost certainly would have solved that surge, which would give Trump less of a mandate to take drastic action if he wins in November.
The most obvious retort to this idea is that Trump is by no means guaranteed to win in November. As of the time of writing, prediction markets give Trump a 47% chance of winning, which we can round up to 50%. This essentially means the Republicans are gambling on a “double or nothing” approach, but even this prospect is unsteady. For starters, how much more could Trump deliver in excess of this bill, even under the best plausible conditions? HR2 is instructive here, which passed the House in 2023 but is not likely to advance any further in the current Congress. As such, it’s essentially a conservative wishlist on immigration. It is indeed stronger than the Senate bill, but it’s not massively stronger. I’d say instead of “double or nothing” it’s more like “10-20% more or nothing”, which has decidedly less of a ring to it. Furthermore, Democratic willingness to capitulate has an expiration date. If the moment isn’t gone already, then it’d definitely be gone when Trump takes office for a second time, which would mean he’d require control of both the House and the Senate to push through a stronger bill. Prediction markets currently give a 74% chance for Republicans to clinch the Senate, which we can round up to 75%, and a 44% chance to win control of the House, which we can again round up to 50%. If results from the races were perfectly independent, simple statistics shows us that Republicans only have <20% chance of achieving a trifecta. Granted, the races almost certainly won’t be uncorrelated with each other, but this still establishes a lower bound of likelihood. In essence, Republicans are gambling at 20-50% odds that they’ll be able to get a bill that’s 10-20% better. Even this is still underselling it, since it would have to go through one major final hurdle: Trump himself. Republicans already had a trifecta from 2017-2019, yet Trump chose not to prioritize immigration other than through flimsy executive orders. Who’s to say he wouldn’t choose to do so again?
The upshot
I’m sure some people will dismiss everything I’ve written here as concern trolling. They’ll assume I’m secretly a Democratic operative who wants to sow discord amongst Republicans. In reality, I’m just someone who actually wants to get immigration under control. Immigration can be a source of strength, but it must be harnessed very carefully to not cause major problems.
This bill represented the most conservative major immigration reform in a generation that actually had a chance at passing, and Donald Trump killed it for purely cynical reasons. This single bill would have done more than every one of Trump’s executive orders put together. Anyone who’s been seriously watching him knows that he’s utterly self-serving, but what was truly revolting was how the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party not only let him get away with it, but actively cheered him on. It’ll likely be totally forgotten too, wrongly dismissed as nothing more than another Democratic trap.
The worst part of the bill was that many of its provisions weren’t permanent. Some parts like closing the asylum loophole were, but the funding for extra agents would eventually run out. Similarly, other provisions like the incoherently reviled Border Emergency Authority were due to sunset in 3, 5, or 10 years. But the correct response would have been for Republicans to reach out at this golden opportunity with both hands and grasp as hard as they could. Then, they should have fought future battles to ensure the provisions were made permanent. Instead, they squandered a period of maximal Democratic vulnerability on the issue, when the Dems were not only willing to give concessions but were actively asking for them.
Illegal immigration has cooled a bit since its apex in December of 2023. In the CBP’s most recent report from March, encounters are down by 45%. This is still massively elevated from where it was before, but it will at least allow Biden to claim he’s on top of the issue. It seems he’s doing this with ad-hoc fixes, like making deals with intermediate countries that are unlikely to really solve much long-term. In killing the bill, Trump has likely undercut one of his attack vectors against Biden somewhat. When pressed in a debate about the issue, Biden can say “I tried to fix it, but you wouldn’t let me”. In the end, few peoples’ minds will be changed, and the most likely outcome no matter who becomes president is that the US continues muddling along with the status quo on immigration, which means more bandaids and can-kicking. In the off chance that an immigration reform bill actually does pass, it will likely be far less conservative than this bill would have been.
How to square this with something like @gattsuru’s recent post (and follow-up)? He starts from the assumption that Republicans are, in fact, no longer interested in compromise, attributing it to decades of policy ratchets and plausibly-deniable enforcement. And he provides receipts. If he’s correct, then Congressional stonewalling is a rational response to the failure of previous compromises.
Second, some discussion about whether Trump credibly advanced a different issue: the deep state. That was how I learned about the attempt to create a Schedule F of policy-driven government employees. It was a battle entirely waged within the executive branch. Trump promulgated an XO; Biden rolled it back. Various agencies fumbled to add more regulations which would slow or stop a future return. Never was Congress consulted, of course.
It seems obvious that Congress, by refusing to act, hands more power to the Executive and Judicial branches. But it also seems obvious that Executive power is too fragile to survive an opposing presidency. And there’s a long list of reasons why the Judiciary is not a satisfactory policymaker.
I suspect that relying on Trump’s branding is a strategic blunder. No, it’s relying on one man in general. The Democrats leaned on Obama after 2008, and supposedly it completely eroded their back bench. Now we’re watching the GOP double down on an uncomfortably similar mistake.
I agree, they're obviously not interested in compromise, and in some cases it's for good reasons. That said, even if this bill just added the text about amending asylum rules to the official US laws, this bill would have been worth it. Dealing with asylum stuff is something Trump struggled against for his entire presidency, and he kept failing due to the courts ruling that EO's couldn't override rules of Congress. Had this bill passed, then at least any EO's Trump would enact in his next potential administration would carry much more weight.
When you add in the rest of the bill and compare it to the paltry concessions given to Democrats, the choice to pass it should have been obvious even if the Democrats tried to stonewall it in some (or many) ways.
Couldn't agree more. Candidates should be avatars of the people to enact desired policies. Trump was plausibly this sort of person in 2016 which is why I voted for him then, but he's since proven that he's really not up to the task. The Republican base should have dumped him for Desantis or some other candidate in the 2020 primary. Sure, all candidates have problems, but if they didn't do what was wanted then they should have been dumped too, and the base should have kept dumping candidates until somebody actually enacted policies. Instead, the Republican party has effectively turned into a cult of personality since many Republicans' only barometer of candidate quality is "how much he makes leftists seethe".
Trump won in 2016 because he was a threatening outsider, and that is what the people wanted in an avatar. Desantis can't be that, because he isn't that. No more than Jeff Sessions could have been it, or McCain earlier. The credibility as an outsider is the key
Well, only because he whipped the rest of the centrist (uniparty) Republicans so thoroughly in the primaries. It was his ability to say the unsayable to other Republicans that attracted his wild popularity. Then he conquered the party as the avatar of the people's will, and now the unsayable is the unpleasant threat to our democracy, but being repeated day after day.
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