Transcript: Top Trump Ally Reveals His Alarming Plans for “Day One”
Sargent: Right. There’s actually a key thing that happened during the campaign that really underscored what you’re getting at here, which is when Trump and JD Vance and MAGA started attacking Haitian immigrants for “eating pets” and so forth in Springfield, Ohio, they were essentially saying also those immigrants are not actually legal. Now, of course they were actually legal. Many of them are here on temporary protected status. So they were legally in the country and they were working, they had joined communities, they were contributing to them. They were actually contributing to American life, and part of American life legally. But what Trump was saying there is, I can revoke your legality. And this goes to your point about people feeling on really thin ice in every way and feeling if the rule of law isn’t going to be there to protect them; he can just revoke it.
Kurtz: Whipping up this furor and whipping up this highly emotional, highly agitated response to immigrants and all the different groups that we’ve talked about is going to be an ongoing feature of this administration in the same way that it was the first administration. In the sense, the campaign never ends, because you always need an enemy. You always need an other. You always need someone to target. Whether it’s continuing to go after Biden, continuing to go after Harris, continuing to go after these groups, it’s all part of an ongoing thing. That’s what I meant when I said earlier that, in a way, it’s not a means to an end, it’s an end unto itself to have this whipped up furor going all the time.
Sargent: That’s how they keep their people in line and at the ready, stand back and standby. I want to read a line from your piece, David, it went like this: “The campaign was fought directly over the issues of democracy, rule of law, basic decency and respect and protection for the marginalized.” And you also write that those of us who oppose Trump argued against “hurting others as blood sport.” And our argument lost, David. Is it fair to say that it was very much on the ballot whether it’s okay to inflict wanton, sadistic, retributive state violence on others or not?
