Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: If the Supreme Court won’t overrule Trump’s executive order abolishing birthright citizenship, it’s hard to imagine them saying ‘no’ to anything he wants. David Cole, former Legal Director of the ACLU, will explain why they will say ‘no’ to him when they get the new birthright citizenship class action case. But first: Elon Musk is starting his own political party to challenge Trump. Will that work? Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party will comment – in a minute.
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There’s trouble in Trump world. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is launching a third party to challenge Trump’s Republicans in the midterms and maybe in 2028. He says the Republicans passing Trump’s budget – he called it “this insane spending bill” – convinced him that “our country needs an alternative to the Democrat-Republican uniparty, so that the people actually have a VOICE,” in all caps, he’s calling it, “the America Party.”
The polls show a lot of support, at least in the abstract, for a new third party. Last October, 58% said the two parties do such a poor job representing people that a third party was needed. And for years, most independents have said a third party is needed. Last year it was 69% of independents.
For comment we turn to Maurice Mitchell. He’s National Director of the Working Families Party. We saw him recently with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now talking about Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Maurice Mitchell, welcome to the program.
Maurice Mitchell: It’s good to be here.
JW: Is the Working Families Party a third party?
MM: Yes, we are. We’re a nationwide, bottom up, third party movement. We started 26 years ago in New York leveraging fusion voting so that we could have ballot access as a third party.
JW: Explain fusion voting for those of us who live in states like California, where fusion voting is banned.
MM: Sure. I mean, it used to be the Law of the land. It was very, very popular in the United States. Fusion voting allows parties to cross endorse the candidates of others. So in 2020, Joe Biden wasn’t our first choice or our second choice, it was our third choice, and we endorsed him against Donald Trump.
In 2024, we endorsed Kamala Harris against Donald Trump, and our voters in New York and Connecticut were able to vote on the Working Families Party line for those candidates. And what it allows us to do is to be able to signal a very specific message Yes, in this binary between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, no question, we align with Harris and we have some notes, we disagree with her on her policies around Gaza and her relationship to unions. We want it to be stronger and we’re able to say all those things through the Working Families Party ballot line.
So hundreds of thousands of people in those states are able to vote their conscience while being strategic voters against the right wing in the general election. And also, we as a party are able to cycle after cycle, year after year, build our strength, build our name recognition, build our party brand, and organize on the local level so that more and more voters are able to come together and use their voter power to signal that, and then up and down the ballot, it has a real impact. So post-election, when our candidates, our preferred candidates win all the way from president down to city council, we’re able to say this specific amount of voters voted for you, and oftentimes we’re the difference maker. There are congressional races where the Working Families Party voters were the difference makers. There are city council elections where the Working Families Party voters where the difference maker, and that absolutely allows us to leverage that when it comes time to govern.
JW: Now, what Musk has in mind is what most people think of as a third party running separate candidates, not endorsing candidates on a separate line. And it did happen once before that a single rich person launched a third party campaign against deficit spending. Same issue, got on the ballot in all 50 states, took votes from the incumbent Republican. That was Ross Perot in 1992, ran as an independent against George HW Bush got almost 20% – that’s the most any third party candidate has gotten since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Perot did not run any candidates for House or Senate. It was just a presidential campaign. Now, Elon Musk can’t do that. He can’t run for president. He wasn’t born in the United States, but do you think a Musk third party effort focused on some House and Senate seats could have some success starting with the midterms next year?
MM: You might be surprised at my skepticism. And so, he’s doing what we call ‘the Ross Perot play’ at the Working Families Party. It’s a top-down billionaire backed strategy. We’ve seen it fail. You’re right, Ross Perot didn’t break 20%. He got to around 19% and then he ran again, and he got less votes. He got 11 million less votes in 1996. And so, to me, it’s a strategy that is kind of like a spectacle. It’s more of a communication strategy versus a serious organizing strategy. If you’re going to build a third party in America, we believe you have to work from the bottom up. Then also, when you think about who Elon Musk is, right, he has this track record of making really bold promises and predictions, and he tends not to deliver on them. They tend to kind of fall through. I mean, I don’t know, like he said, that humans will be on Mars by 2026.
Now granted it’s not 2026 yet, so he has a few months, right? I mean, he also said that there’ll be a hundred million robot taxis by 2020. Maybe there are, and I haven’t seen them. But the other thing about Musk, what do we know about Musk? He has a hard time with his attention span, and so this is something that’s fascinating him today. What we’ve learned over 26 years is that the way to build third party politics in our very rigid two-party system is it’s a generational process and you have to really look at the long haul, and we have no problem with third party candidacy in the general election. I mean, Tish James famously got her entrance into politics as running as a WP only candidate for city council in Brooklyn, right? It can be done, but not on the presidential level and not through a billionaire and his money. It’s like billionaire plus money plus crazy idea does not equal a third party. So I would just, I’m highly skeptical and also billionaires have their choice of two of the parties already. We don’t need a third billionaire party.
JW: Okay? Musk, however, seems to have thought about the Perot campaign, or at least somebody has told him about it, and he does have a plan that is different from the parole plan that’s not completely crazy. He does not want to run candidates everywhere. He’s aiming for what he calls surgical disruption of the two-party system by targeting just a handful of key races, two or three Senate seats, eight or 10 House districts. His goal is to flip just enough seats to hold the balance of power in the next Congress so that there could be a swing block in a closely divided Senate and House, and they could be the deciding force in passing legislation, especially on spending and taxes. We even know what states he’s thinking about. The Senate seat in Michigan is being vacated by a Democrat, Gary Peters, it’s kind of a 50/50 state. In Georgia, Democrat Jon Ossoff is up for reelection and the Republicans don’t have a strong candidate to challenge him. In North Carolina, famously, Thom Tillis, Republican is stepping down after clashing with Trump over spending. And in the House, just to run this down briefly, The Cook Political Report lists 18 toss-up seats, Musk is looking just at eight supposedly. My favorite is he says he wants to target Elise Stefanik in that corner of New York state up there by Vermont and Canada. It would be great to see her defeated. He also wants to run somebody in. He wants to challenge Marcy Kaptur, the Democrat in Toledo and longest serving woman in congressional history, 79 years old to serve 42 years. So he’s got some ideas that aren’t completely crazy about how to get power in a closely divided Congress, so it’s not like Perot.
MM: Sure, those are all interesting theoretical ideas, but when you bring it into the world as it is, and you imagine if the medium voter in any of these districts have an appetite for a wholly billionaire backed race-scientist backed Elon Musk sort of fever, dream play, right? Look, the voters of Wisconsin didn’t just reject MAGA and the Republicans and the prospect of a conservative majority in their Supreme Court. They also roundly rejected Elon Musk and the idea that our politics should be completely and wholly captured by oligarch.
JW: That’s a great example. The Wisconsin Supreme Court case where Musk put in what, 20 or $25 million. No one had ever done anything like that before in any state Supreme Court race and campaigned personally himself. There was that rally in Green Bay where he ended up speaking for two hours and barely mentioned the candidate. And the candidate then lost by 10 points. The Republican lost by 10 points in a state that – it is basically a 50/50 state. So you’re absolutely right. Wisconsin shows that Musk himself is a terrible political leader, and candidate – plan seems to be though to get “better candidates” than himself.
MM: I feel like that’s a distinction without a difference because ultimately, they will be candidates for the wholly Elon Musk-backed “America party” – and they will immediately be drawn down by all of the baggage that comes with Elon Musk. I think most voters, including the Republican Party primary voter, are not likely drawn to the very bizarre politics of Elon Musk. And what we’ve seen, and we’ve been a third party for 26 years and we’ve grown in every one of those 26 years. We started in New York; we now do politics all across the country, we endorse close to a thousand candidates up and down the ballot everywhere that voters aren’t stupid. There are some basic core American values, and I think we saw them in Wisconsin. Most voters when they understand that their votes are being bought, reject that. So I could already imagine the ads that will be played against his candidates. I could picture two or three really good ones. Apparently, according to the Supreme Court, he’s entitled to do anything he wants to do politically with his money, but there’s a ceiling on that.
We saw that also in New York City, and this is another example of where billionaires and their hubris come up against the will of everyday working people. They spent $25 million against the Working Families Party, our ideals against directly against Zohran Mamdani in order to ram through a Cuomo victory in the New York City primary for mayor. And ultimately, the people of New York rejected the big money politics. I mean, if you were a voter in New York, I mean you couldn’t watch TV, you couldn’t stream on any of the platforms without getting all of the scary imagery about Zohran Mamdani, and people rejected it. And so there’s a point where big money can’t trump the power of organizing and good ideas and just like the basic decency of everyday American voters.
JW: And there’s one other issue. Musk seems to have kind of a single-issue campaign that he has in mind here: deficit spending, reduce the deficit, which means cut spending or raise taxes. Is that a winning issue in swing districts in America?
MM: Look, I mean—
JW: You’re laughing.
MM: There are certain issues and platforms that are really powerful, debated, really popular in two places, corporate C-suites and in the halls of Congress. [Laughter] One of them is this obsession with deficit spending. There is no constituency in America that is electorally significant, let’s say that votes on this abstract idea around deficit spending. What we’ve done is we’ve gone out and we’ve talked to working people. What they care about is affordability. What they’re concerned with as it relates to their government is they want a government that works for them. And so what that means is they don’t want government to do less. They want government to do more, consistently. The American people, independents, Democrats, Republicans want government to do more for them, and they want a government that is effective, which means they’re not interested in abstract ideas around efficiency. Sure, efficiency sounds good, but in practice, if it means that you, you’re actually taking away the needed programs and the services of the government, the people reject that.
And so if he plans on running on DOGE and more DOGE, I think he’s going to find that there’s not going to be an appetite by very many voters for that. What people have experienced that to be is chaos. Voters don’t like chaos; is hardworking government workers who provide services losing their jobs. It turns out voters don’t like that in terms of people don’t like that. So if he’s going to run on his record and he’s going to run on deficit spending and doing more of what DOGE has done and he attaches his candidates to that, they’re going to run on with this albatross of Elon Musk, his horrible record in government, his obsession with deficit spending at a time when people are concerned with affordability. That seems like a very poor recipe for politics in this moment where people are frustrated across the board with the oligarchs.
They’ve had it with the billionaire class. People want the government to do more, not less. And people want a politics that focuses like a laser on affordability, helping them to afford rent, childcare, healthcare, at a time where working people are struggling and feel like they’re trying to overcome a mountain of medical debt and college debt and just trying to get by. Right now, in most cities, it’s hard for even people who feel like they’re solidly middle class to get by. And if you could imagine all the people who are struggling even to enter the middle class, but just like majority of Americans, I just don’t see there to be an appetite. Abstractly, people do want more options; abstractly, people do want more choice. I think the particular choice instead of the Democratic Party, which is partially oligarch-inspired, and the Republican party, which is wholly oligarch-inspired, this one is like run by one oligarch. There you have options, right?
JW: There is one more significant third party candidate on the scene right now. Andrew Cuomo for mayor of New York City in November. I know that WFP was a big organizer for Mamdani in the Democratic Party primary, of course, where he defeated Cuomo, the favorite of the party establishment, as you said, they spent $25 million trying to get Mamdani defeated. Now, Cuomo has declared he will remain in the race running on, what’s his line called, the ‘Fight and Deliver’ party. And he’s got a scheme here. I don’t know if this’ll work, but there seems to be a pact shaping up between all the other challengers to block Mamdani that the other challengers agree they will drop out if they are not the top anti-Mamdani candidate with the most support in the polls in mid-September. That’s Mayor Eric Adams, he’s running on the ’End Antisemitism’ party line and the ‘Safe and Affordable’ party line. This is an only-in-New-York kind of a story. Cuomo himself is running as the candidate of the Fight and Deliver Party. Curtis Sliwa is running as a Republican. Jim Walden is an independent. What do you think of this pact shaping up to block a Mamdani victory in November?
MM: Well, “vote blue no matter who,” right? Remember that? [Laughter] Knowing Andrew Cuomo and knowing him to be singularly obsessed with power, and being animated like few others by ambition, and by his path to the presidency, I’m not surprised that he’s found another path.
Look, we are witnessing every single day, more and more labor unions, more and more elected officials from across the coalition, the pro-democracy coalition, consolidate around Zohran Mamdani – that’s where the momentum is. He continues to campaign; we continue to campaign with him. Between now and November, we anticipate making clear to the people of New York that there is an opportunity on the ballot to move forward, and we think that that’s what most people want. There’s an opportunity on the ballot to get away from the politics, the very dour politics of Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Adams, and actually focus on their affordability.
And so those contrasts, if it’s two contrasts or three contrasts with five contrasts, politics is often about contrast, those contrasts aren’t necessarily bad for us, and we plan to engage in a very rigorous set of conversations with New Yorkers, including the ones that voted for Zohran in the primary and all the others that are now waking up to a new set of politics because it’s been seismic, and are very, very curious about the values of Zohran’s campaign, how he plans to govern the city of New York and the coalition that he’s going to build around him.
So look, in most normal politics, you would imagine that people would consolidate around the candidate, but again, the clown car that they want to assemble inside of, they’re more than happy to, and I think we’re feeling pretty bullish about the argument that we’re going to make in November.
JW: Maurice Mitchell – he’s National Director of the Working Families Party. Mo, thanks for talking with us today.
MM: Good to be with you.
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Jon Wiener: It’s been a bad week for Donald Trump. His MAGA base is in an uproar over his denials about a Jeffrey Epstein client list. His tariffs are increasingly chaotic and unpopular. His bromance with Putin seems to be over. And in the courts, we have a new nationwide injunction blocking his efforts to abolish birthright citizenship, and an injunction against ICE in Los Angeles, Trump’s ground zero for attacking immigrants. For comment on the court rulings, we turn to David Cole. He recently stepped down after eight years as national legal director of the ACLU to return to teaching law at Georgetown. He writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New York Review, and he’s legal affairs correspondent for The Nation. David, welcome back.
David Cole: Thanks for having me, Jon.
JW: Trump’s executive order abolishing birthright citizenship is unconstitutional – pretty much everybody agrees about that, including even The Wall Street Journal editorial page – and maybe, maybe, even the Supreme Court. It’s the simplest case where the court should say ‘no’ to Trump. And if they don’t do that, it’s hard to imagine they would say ‘no’ to anything.
The court this term had a chance to say ‘no’ to Trump on abolishing birthright citizenship. His order had been blocked temporarily by a nationwide injunction issued by a district court, which cited the 14th Amendment, which explicitly says if you’re born in the United States, you’re a citizen of the United States. But instead of settling the case at that point, the Supreme Court left it open — and instead issued a sweeping ruling on a related issue, striking down nationwide injunctions issued by district courts, including this one. But the court did point to one alternative they said would be acceptable for nationwide injunctions: class action suits. So the ACLU filed one the same day. And then a district court, as they say, ‘certified the class.’ Please explain what that means and where we stand today.
DC: Sure. So the previous cases that had been filed against the Birthright Citizenship Executive order were not class actions. They were suits on behalf of, one of them was on behalf of an organization that had a number of immigrants who were members and they sued on their behalf. Some states sued saying they had obligations to citizens, and they had to determine who is a citizen. And this sort of upended that. And in those cases, the courts found the order unconstitutional and enjoined it nationally, not just as to the parties before the court. And what the Supreme Court said was you can’t do that. The court has the power to issue injunctive relief for the parties before it and not to parties that are not before it. But if it has the proper parties before it, it can issue a nationwide injunction. And in particular, if there was a nationwide class, if the suit was brought essentially on behalf of all people in the country who would be subject to this order and that’s an appropriate class, then the court can issue relief to that entire class. And so actually that decision came out on a, I don’t know, Thursday or Friday, I can’t remember now, but within hours the ACLU had filed a class action in New Hampshire and that has now been certified and the judge has now granted a nationwide injunction to that class. So that’s very likely to go back up to the Supreme Court. But nothing in the decision that the court rendered earlier this summer would bar relief in that case.
JW: The response of the Trump administration was that the New Hampshire judge was wrong because “the American people voted for this agenda.” Is that the basis on which judges make decisions?
DC: I don’t think so. It is the Constitution, Mr. President and the Constitution says if you are born here, you are a citizen as long as your parents are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. And pretty much everybody except for diplomats are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. And I have no doubt you suggested you thought maybe this Supreme Court would rule the birthright citizenship order unconstitutional. I actually have no doubt this court will strike it down as unconstitutional when it comes before it in a proper case. And I think one of the reasons that the Trump administration only appealed to the Supreme Court on the scope of relief question, the nationwide injunction question and not on the merits of the birthright citizenship was because they realize they’re very likely to lose on that ground and they didn’t want to go up on the first major case and lose.
JW: The Trump spokesman also said the judge who certified the class for birthright citizenship was not paying attention to the Supreme Court ruling in this case. Do you agree with that?
DC: I think whoever made that statement was not paying attention to the Supreme Court ruling in this case because the Supreme Court expressly said that if there’s a proper class action you can have nationwide relief. And they also left open other avenues for nationwide relief. And particularly they said if the states can show that in order to get complete relief for the states, a nationwide injunction is necessary, it’s appropriate.
JW: So what are the next steps now with the birthright citizenship class action? Does this just go to the Supreme Court next term, and they’ll decide?
DC: Well, I think it is sort of up to the Trump administration. They have the right to seek an emergency stay of this district court injunction first from the Court of Appeals and then from the Supreme Court and that could all be done this summer.
JW: Now the rules about what a class action suit has to be are very well established. It’s a very familiar part of litigation. If the Trump administration challenges the certification of a class in this case, has the court met the requirements for what makes for a class action case?
DC: That’s a great question. That will be the issue I think going up. Is this an appropriate class? I think it’s a pretty clear example of an appropriate class where, because basically everybody who’s subject to the law is subject to the law in the same way and for the same reason. And therefore, the claims are all identical. And in that context where you’re seeking an injunction against a national policy and that national policy affects all the people subject to it in the same way a class action is appropriate. The Supreme Court has made it much more difficult to pursue class actions where you might have differing factual circumstances, employment actions for example, where different people could be fired for various different reasons, very difficult to get class actions there. But on this kind of a case where it’s a challenge to a rule that applies the same way to every person to whom it is applied, I think this is a strong case. I think the injunction will be affirmed when it goes up.
JW: Let’s go back to the ban on nationwide injunctions issued by district courts. And a lot of our friends said this ruling was a total disaster. It’s a tremendous help to Trump and a blow to all the rest of us. But there are a few things people need to know about that. I just want to clarify. This ban does not apply retroactively to the existing nationwide injunctions blocking Trump. Isn’t that right? There are over a hundred of them and they stay in force. Those injunctions blocking Trump’s executive orders remain in effect till they are litigated if the Trump administration brings them back to court. Isn’t that right?
DC: Yes and no. It is a Supreme Court precedent on the appropriate circumstances in which district courts can issue nationwide relief. And so yes, there are a number of other nationwide injunctions against Trump. Trump can now go back in, he will have to go back in those cases to raise those claims. But if he goes in and raises those claims in many circumstances, he’ll have a decent argument that can be made. But again, what the court said was the court’s power to issue injunctions is limited to the parties before it. And so there’s two ways in which you can get a nationwide injunction. If the parties before you are a nationwide class that is, it’s a class of people across the country, then the court can afford relief to those parties. And the second way is if providing relief to the parties before the court requires nationwide relief in order to afford the parties before the court complete relief, it’s appropriate to issue complete nationwide injunction.
And that issue was present in the Supreme Court case, and they sent it back down to the lower courts with respect to the states saying the lower courts will have to decide in the first instance whether in order to provide effective relief to the states that sued the court needs to in effect provide a national injunction. And if it’s necessary to provide complete relief, it’s permissible. So yes, Trump can go back into any court where there’s a nationwide injunction and challenge that injunction, but the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA laid out a number of avenues that permit lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions when the proper plaintiffs are before them or when the relief is necessary. So I don’t think it’s as outrageous a decision as many people have said. I think there’s still plenty of ways to get nationwide relief.
JW: For example, there has been a nationwide injunction blocking Trump’s executive order cutting federal funding to sanctuary cities, cities that refuse to cooperate with ICE. And Trump’s legal team is now I understand trying to narrow those injunctions to apply only to the plaintiff cities. That was a case that was brought by San Francisco and some Bay area of cities and suburbs. Now 34 more cities and counties have joined that case including Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Denver – and it seems like the courts are likely to say, ‘well. that’s appropriate’ — don’t you think?
DC: Exactly. So that’s right. It’s essentially those who need the relief can just join the case as co-plaintiffs and then they are before the court and the court can afford them the same relief that is already afforded to San Francisco. Again, that’s another way in which you can extend the relief is that you just join other plaintiffs. So it does put greater burdens on plaintiffs and courts to justify nationwide relief, but it does not block nationwide relief where it is necessary. And oftentimes when it is a federal policy that has been called into question and the court has found that that federal policy is just across the board unconstitutional, that is a situation in which it’s appropriate to provide nationwide relief as long as you have a class that represents that the people who would be affected.
JW: And hasn’t our side complained in the past about nationwide injunctions issued by right wing district court judges? There’s that judge in Texas I remember blocked a vaccination mandate for federal employees and we were outraged and said, this is misuse of the law. So this cuts both ways.
DC: Yeah, absolutely. This is – when Biden was the president, the right wing legal apparatus used nationwide injunctions to block many of his actions. The courts today have issued nationwide injunctions to block many of Trump’s actions. And again, what the Supreme Court said was you just have to have the right parties before you. And sometimes that’s actually really hard, getting the right parties all together on the same page in the same case. But where it’s appropriate, you can still get nationwide relief.
JW: And I want to talk just briefly about one big immigration case. The federal court in Los Angeles that found late Friday afternoon that the federal government’s ongoing immigration raids in Los Angeles and around Southern California likely violated the Constitution by singling out Latinos for arrest and detention on the basis of their race or ethnicity. And the federal court prohibited ICE from continuing this kind of raid throughout southern California. This was a case brought by the ACLU of Southern California along with Public Counsel, ImmDef and CHIRLA and some other immigrants’ rights groups. And then it was joined later by the city of LA and seven other cities and LA County. They argued ICE was arresting people based on their ethnicity and race: Latinos. Picking up people at car washes, swap meets, day laborers gathered outside Home Depot, farm workers in the strawberry fields in Ventura County — just because they looked like Latinos — and then denied them contact with attorneys. Seems like a pretty strong case to me.
DC: Yeah, I think very strong case. The way that ICE has been carrying out its enforcement authority is outrageous. And to treat looking Latino as illegally in the country is just, is basis. And particularly in a place like Los Angeles where you have a massive Latino population, many of them citizens, many of them permanent residents, many of them legally here, to treat someone as suspect simply because of their ethnicity is unconstitutional and unethical. And then to deny them access to counsel. Everyone has the right to consult with counsel once they’re arrested. So you had a situation in which ICE was just running roughshod over the rights of these people and the courts have said, no, you got to respect their rights. The Constitution protects all of us in the United States. It protects those who are citizens and those who are not. It protects those who are legally here and those who are illegally here. The whole idea of due process and of right to counsel is so that we just make the right decisions about who is properly subject to the authority of the state and who is not. So a great decision and I hope ICE will transform and reform its practices. My guess is that they’ll instead appeal and keep engaging in what they’re doing, but we’ll see.
JW: One last thing. What Trump and ICE are doing is massively unpopular. People really don’t like these raids in LA on residents who’ve been here for a decade who have jobs and families. The most recent polling on this comes from Gallup where the findings are worse than any poll in Trump’s second term. This is a month-long survey in June — Americans were asked whether they approve or disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration. Disapprove 62%, approve 35%. And as for strongly approve and strongly disapprove, more than twice as many Americans strongly disapproved as strongly approved, 45% strongly disapproved, only 21% strongly approved. This is especially the case for independents. Nearly 70% of people who called themselves independent voters said they disapproved of what Trump’s been doing on immigration. These are the worst numbers Trump has ever gotten on polls on immigration. The trend has been clearly downward.
Another fascinating finding, a record number of adults say immigration is good for the country. 79% say immigration is good; 17% say immigration is bad. And the big change in the last few months has been among Republicans. Now 64% of Republicans say immigrants are good for the country. The percentage of Americans who say immigration should be reduced has dropped down to 30% – the lowest it’s been in recent decades. So the ACLU often does not represent the majority. Usually, they’re defending minority rights. It seems like right now on immigration, the ACLU represents a great majority of Americans.
DC: In some sense Trump has performed a miracle – because for a long time it seemed like there was no good politics around immigration, other than being tough on immigration. And this was a real weakness for the Democrats, and one that Trump exploited. But he clearly has overread his mandate, he’s overreached. And when you see people — people that they know getting caught up in this, they see it on the news. They see ICE agents wearing masks, arresting college students for writing op-eds in the newspaper. That kind of overplaying of one’s hand is precisely the kind of thing that gets Americans, gets their backs up, and they say, ‘wait a minute. We may not have liked the chaos at the border, but we didn’t want you to be coming into our schools and our churches and into courts and picking up people who are not illegally here. You have gone way too far.’ And if it leads to fundamental restructuring of our politics around immigration, that would be a great thing.
JW: David Cole – you can read him at The New York Review. Thank you, David. This was great.
DC: Thanks Jon.