Washington Monthly Editor in Chief Paul Glastris, Politics Editor Bill Scher and Executive Editor for Digital Matt Cooper join Anne Kim to talk about this weekend’s protests, Trump’s flop of a military parade, political violence in Minnesota, and the prospect of a regional war in the Middle East.
Trump’s Military Parade vs. No Kings Protests
Anne Kim: Let’s start with the military parade, which was ostensibly for the 250th birthday of the army, but also Trump’s 79th birthday as well. It cost at least $45 million, and it was hyped as this huge extravaganza. At the same time, we had a nationwide day of “No Kings” protests, where there were more than 2,000 gatherings nationwide. So I think there’s probably plenty of reason to believe Trump was disappointed and that his parade was upstaged by the protests.
What do you guys think? Matt, you wrote about this right beforehand. What’s your verdict on the impact of the protests versus the parade?
Matthew Cooper: It was low energy, as the president used to say about Jeb Bush. People who thought they were getting a Nuremberg rally were disappointed by what was more of a lackadaisical state fair parade. There was a fair amount of space between each one of these military vehicles. And since they were kind of a monotone green throughout the whole thing, except for the flybys of the Chinooks and the Apaches, it was a fairly sedate affair with fairly low attendance. So I think you’re right to suggest that deep in his dark heart, the president probably found it disappointing.
I think the protests were a rousing success. They were well attended, they were peaceful, they were ubiquitous across the country. So in that sense, for Trump opponents it was a big plus. I have to confess, I thought it would be more of a menacing spectacle than it was. I think in the end, it was more a celebration of the army than him, although he included himself in some of the video asides. But it was less authoritarian in its final delivery than I think those who pictured a Red Square parade or a Pyongyang Kim Jong-un style affair expected. What they got was more sedate and more celebratory of the army than of him.
Anne Kim: I don’t know if you guys saw the viral video of the squeaky tank that was rolling down pretty much silent streets. For me that kind of said it all. Bill and Paul, what do you guys think?
Paul Glastris: I attended a No Kings rally out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and watched some of the Trump birthday army parade on cable—CNN and Fox. I basically have Matt’s take on it. I would say that from what I’ve read of people who were there, it was enjoyable for people who were there. The soldiers seemed to enjoy doing it.
The thing to remember is the army hated this idea, abhorred this idea. Remember Trump tried to get this to happen in his first term and his defense secretary, Jim Mattis, who was a career army officer, absolutely refused to do it for the reasons that Matt said—he didn’t want an authoritarian spectacle.
That may have been what Trump wanted. It is not what the army delivered. The army delivered a recruitment campaign and a history lesson. They had Sherman tanks from World War II and they had mounted soldiers to reflect World War I and they had drones to reflect today’s equipment. And it was a sedate and staid affair—not a projection of US power, which if that’s what Trump wanted, he didn’t get.
Matthew Cooper: Without the missile launchers you don’t get that Kim Jong-un vibe, and since the Air Force and the Navy have the ICBMs you’re never gonna get the really big ones.
Paul Glastris: That’s right. And on the other hand, there were probably on the order of 5 million people who protested around the country at the No Kings rallies and maybe 50,000 who showed up for the parade in Washington. So that’s 100 to one attendance difference.
From my own experience and reading about these No Kings events, they were all rooted in 1776. They were American flags. They were not transgressive or aggressive. And they were very clever. The signs were—there was a gay pride event at the same time as the No Kings event in Easton, Maryland. And one woman had a sign that said “No Kings, Just Queens.” There was a lot of that kind of fun that people had, often at Trump’s expense. So I think history looking back will not look at this as a particularly great day for Donald Trump and maybe a good day for America.
Bill Scher: I think one of the reasons why the military parade ended up not being as disturbing as anticipated is that so many other disturbing authoritarian things have already happened that are not merely symbolic. And so a few tanks on the street pales in comparison to actually unleashing the national guard on human beings within the United States.
It is also clearly more than leavened by the outpouring of opposition to Trump in the No Kings protests. On that score, I have a long-standing skepticism of rallies and protests that lack specific asks—Occupy Wall Street, Women’s March—things of that nature, because it’s harder to decide what do you do with all this energy and where are you taking it the next day? This arguably has that challenge as well.
I’m probably more favorable to No Kings than these other ones, because there was a real risk of demoralization amongst the progressive diaspora. You saw that depression in the first weeks of the second Trump presidency. And this is a very clear indication that folks are not giving up and want to get back in the arena and fight on. The fact that the No Kings protest so outlapped what Trump had in mind further helps with that morale.
But there is the question of what do you do next? And I don’t claim to have an easy answer for that because there are so many awful things happening all at once, it’s hard to pick one. But more people getting off the sidelines and looking for things to do on net is better than sitting at home.
Matthew Cooper: I think there was a good thread by a former political advance guy about just what a poor job of logistics and advance work it was, which if you’ve covered campaigns, you know, is a fine art. The entrances were a big mess. So actually there were pretty big crowds, but at one point they’re funneled through a single gate, which made everything pretty awful.
And then the people who were coming to the parade, many of them had to cross a hastily constructed bridge over Constitution Avenue, which was not tarped, so that it provided a perfect viewing point. So basically, everybody got up to the bridge and stopped. Maybe they could urge them along a little bit, but then the next group would stop. So this was already awful design made even worse.
There was lots and lots of this. So it was a pleasant reminder that they’re not great at execution. I mean, they’ve engaged at dazzling speed dismantling USAID, Voice of America and other things, but it’s a reminder that they’re not so consistent in their abilities.
Paul Glastris: Plus it rained.
Anne Kim: Yeah, wrecking is what they’re best at.
Public Opinion and Political Impact
Anne Kim: I want to pick up on Bill’s point about the implications of the No Kings protests. Before that, I just want to throw one data point out there about the lack of enthusiasm generally among the American public for this parade. NBC put out a poll finding that 64% of Americans disapproved of the use of government money for this parade. And that was 88% of Democrats, predictably, but also 72% of independents. And of those who approved, it was 65% of Republicans overall, but it was 75% of MAGA and 56% of Republicans. So there’s kind of like this $45 million showcase for the base. So we’ll see if that was a good return on investment.
Paul Glastris: And it’s also worth pointing out, it wasn’t covered by any of the networks. It was on cable. But we haven’t, at least as of last night, seen figures for who watched it. For Donald Trump, it’s all about the TV viewers. And my guess is that wasn’t that good.
Bill Scher: It’s also now just overshadowed by No Kings, overshadowed by what’s happening between Israel and Iran, overshadowed by the political violence in Minnesota. Trump tried in 2024 to say the world’s on fire, Joe Biden’s leading us into World War Three, everything’s utter chaos. “I’m going to restore order and sanity to the globe.” And everything around him is more and more chaos. So a military parade intended to show American force is totally discordant with what’s happening all around him. And so as a news story, it just seems irrelevant.
The Durability of the Resistance
Anne Kim: I want to get your guys’ take on the durability of the resistance. Over the weekend, we’re starting to see press reports saying that the resistance has finally arrived, and then that was followed up by other reports warning progressives not to lean in too much on the anti-ICE messaging. So what do you guys think about whether the resistance is really at a turning point? And what are the factors that could either build on this seeming momentum or kill it? Bill, you’ve already alluded to some of those factors.
Bill Scher: Look, we’re in a situation where there’s no singular leader, there is no resistance organization, there’s no singular person who directs it. And the Democratic Party doesn’t have a singular leader. We don’t have a presidential nominee yet who’s dictating “this is the strategy we’re going here and not here.” It’s all inherently—I don’t see this as a criticism just as an observation—it’s inherently diffuse and we know how this is going to work. People are going to do different things. There’s going to be disagreements on tactics. Some people want to play it safer. Some people want to be more edgy and all of these things are going to occur.
The fact that with such diffusion, you had a pretty consistent unity and lack of militancy in No Kings is sort of a precedent of itself. There was some sort of natural agreement on how the image was going to be for this. But how much do you emphasize immigration versus economics? How much do you want to weigh in on what’s happening in the Middle East? There’s not going to be consensus on any of these points. People are just going to do different things.
And it may not matter at the end of the day, when you get to—there’s sort of two things that are in front of us that I can really point to. One is the big, beautiful bill—is that going to become law or not? That is one that could have been an ask, but we didn’t really do that for this thing, but you could channel energy in that direction. Or you can just focus on the election in 2026. And where the specific choices Democrats make on that may not be relevant if the general thrust of that election is a referendum on the incumbent party. So I’m not saying it’s a totally irrelevant discussion to have, but I wouldn’t assume that a degree of disorganization on the Democratic side is going to be fatal for them.
Paul Glastris: Bill, I share your general skepticism of the power of large rallies to have long-term political policy consequences, especially when they don’t have a focused ask. The civil rights marches wanted voting rights and civil rights legislation, and it happened as a result of their actions.
That said, the Women’s March in 2017—and I had people in my house and was shuttling—it was way bigger as you recall than anyone ever thought. And it did have remarkable long-term implications or at least medium-term implications that as we look back on it are pretty impressive. Pretty good after-action reports politically on how people who attended the rallies, especially women, formed friendships with people that they had not known before, got on email lists, built networks. Those networks then became things that politicians and candidates and causes could tap to raise money, to get volunteers. It really did lead to a whole new generation of women running in 2018 and the Democrats did very well that year.
So even though it lacked a specific ask, I think it arguably had real effects. And my guess is that this rally over the weekend has a similar feel to it. Just from my brief encounter with it and reading about it, I think there was the potential to organize around things. But as you said, this is all very decentralized right now. None of the—with the possible exception of Gavin Newsom in California—no governors have really jumped ahead and made themselves the maestros of this. Certainly no one elected in Congress, Democrats have been able to make themselves the maestro. So you kind of fall back on things like this. And I just give the organizers of this thing, Indivisible is the main organizer, enormous credit. I think they did a great job.
Anne Kim: I actually think that decentralization is kind of a virtue right now because there’s so many battles on so many fronts that need to be fought and it gave people something to do. To your point earlier Bill about fighting demoralization, it gave an individual person something to do and I think you’re right Paul, people are going to sign up for various petitions, or they might sign up to volunteer because showing up to protest is a sign of something that can be done, small steps toward larger goals, and perhaps your issue is the environment, or perhaps your issue is women’s issues. The Trump administration is doing something on all of those fronts. So if people become more aware of what’s happening on all of these things, and they pick an issue and do it, and they can stop the administration on specific things, that’s a victory for them.
And yeah, it probably does need to become more focused as we get closer to the elections. But right now, a general shot across the bow to the administration that the overreach is unacceptable might be enough for the time being.
Matthew Cooper: I think this week you saw Mikie Sherrill, the representative from New Jersey, win the Democratic nomination for governor in that state, the most powerful governorship in the country. She is a member of the rather extraordinary class of 2018 of Democrats who took over the House and emerged in the wake of these protests. She’s a Naval Academy graduate.
Abigail Spanberger, who is going to be the Democratic nominee and almost certainly the next governor of Virginia is also a former member of that class and a former CIA case officer. So I think you’re seeing the fruits of the 2017-2018 efforts really come to bear not only in the takeover of the House that lasted a few years during Trump, but also in launching political careers that could have long-term statewide implications, presidential implications. It’s an arc that’s bent in the right direction for Democrats.
Paul Glastris: The way I like to think about it is, divide Democratic questions into two parts, one, the 2026 midterms and the other the 2028 presidential. For the 2026 midterms, as Bill said, it’s going to be largely a referendum on Donald Trump and policy debates and so forth are going to be not nothing but not the important considerations. 2028 is all going to be about vision for the future. It’s going to be wide open unless Donald Trump decides to run. And for that, we’re talking about which party has an economic vision for the working class, which party defines American strategy in the world, et cetera, et cetera.
That’s not where the public is at right now. That may be where the Washington Monthly spends a lot of its time thinking, because we’re thinking over the horizon, but for right now, the need for action on the part of Democrats to respond as strongly as they can to provocations, many of them unconstitutional from the Trump administration, is politically where the party needs to be.
Political Violence in Minnesota
Anne Kim: So I want to turn now to an act of really horrific violence in Minnesota, where a gunman entered the homes of two Minnesota lawmakers, assassinating one and her husband and wounding another. The assassin killed Representative Melissa Hortman, who was a top Democrat in the House, along with her husband, Mark, and State Senator John Hoffman, a fellow Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, were wounded in a separate early morning attack. So as of this morning, police have actually apprehended the suspect, a 57-year-old named Vance Boelter, and they have also found a hit list of 70 names. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has called this, quote, “an act of targeted political violence.”
So at this moment, we don’t know very many details about whether he is in fact kind of a lone wolf, as many people believe, or part of some larger effort, but what do you guys see as the threat of political violence going forward? And honestly, how much is the administration to blame for having set the conditions precedent for these kinds of incidents to occur?
Matthew Cooper: I think it’s always dicey to sort of draw a line from the actions of politicians to the actions of deranged people. Hopefully everyone uses their language in a way that does not inspire hate. I don’t think that Donald Trump has shown such restraint over the years, but nor would I draw any direct line to this guy.
Also, he seems to, at least in some earlier reporting and maybe more, have been quite motivated by his anti-abortion views. I found that both disturbing and interesting because I think there was a sense in which the Trump people believed that the abortion issue could be put aside politically by the Dobbs decision—basically that Dobbs would return the issue to states, so it would kind of work itself out. I don’t think a lot of thought has been given on any side to those who are suddenly—those extreme pro-lifers with a bit of mental derangement—find the current situation intolerable. They got their anti-Roe victory, but now they’re seeing abortion rights enshrined in states like Iowa and Missouri, which are facing ballot initiatives to reverse them. But abortion rights do seem enshrined in much of the country. There’s no appetite from the president for having a nationwide ban. He’s mercurial, so you never know. So I think the idea that post-Roe would lead to deranged right-to-life killers was not on everyone’s mind at the end of June 2022, but now we’ve seen a clinic bombing in Florida. We’ve seen this. There have been some other acts of violence and I think that is very similar.
Paul Glastris: I agree with everything Matt said. I’m just not sure the guy’s deranged. I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about him. There’s no hint that he has much of a social media footprint. He’s married, he’s got kids. He is an entrepreneur who works in funeral homes. He’s 57 years old. When we talk about deranged, it’s often people in their 20s with early onset schizophrenia.
Matthew Cooper: Right. By deranged, I didn’t mean signs of schizophrenia, but just more the kind of screw loose that makes you think this is a good way to spend a Saturday.
Paul Glastris: Yeah, I don’t—we can define it as screw loose or we can define it as cold, hard calculation that this is how I can best help the world. Sick behavior, horrible behavior. But I thought that’s very insightful, Matt, that this is maybe bubbling up, not exactly in a partisan way, but out of the hardcore anti-abortion movement. Minnesota is on the other side of that. Their laws are pro-choice. So we will see. We don’t know a lot about this guy, but that sounds right.
Anne Kim: Bill, one thing to note here, I’m sure you’re on top of this, but the judicial branch has asked for a 10% increase in their budget in the big beautiful bill, a lot of it for security. They wanted a 20% increase in funding for court security in part because of this deluge of threats coming their way. And Matt, I do want to push back a little bit on the straight line point between politicians, what they say and threats of violence, because there has been an exponential rise in threats of violence against judges, in part probably precipitated by Trump’s attacks on judges on Truth Social as he’s facing failure in the courts.
Matthew Cooper: I agree, I agree with that. I really just, in this case—but yes, I think the judges, no question.
Anne Kim: So I guess that is the broader question for you guys: how much political violence can we expect to have happen between now and 2026, now and 2028? And what kind of policy responses would you like to see? Trump put out a kind of desultory statement condemning the violence, but there should be a lot more done, you would think.
Bill Scher: I mean, I don’t know. I’m short on data. So I’m always a little reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions without really looking at numbers. I’ve done articles about mass shootings before. And in recent years, I’ve noted that public mass shooting frequency has gone down, even though people hadn’t necessarily recognized it yet.
So what I’m about to say, I say with some reluctance, I don’t know the exact figures. But it seems to me—there’s been political violence forever. William McKinley was assassinated, James Garfield was assassinated. So it’s not like all of a sudden we have political violence. You’ve always had it. But how is it being directed?
And my gut sense is there is an increase in attacks on sort of quote unquote soft targets, down ballot targets, judges, state reps. Even looking at what’s happening with the recent attacks regarding Middle East politics—attacking two young people outside the Israeli embassy—these are not the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.
So is that a real trend where people feel like, “Hey, we had a spate of school shootings where if you were a teenager who had whatever kind of nihilistic impulses, a sense that if I shoot up a school, I’m going to make a mark in some way. I’m going to get immediate attention for this. I’m going to give meaning to my life or the end of my life.” Is there a trend now where people are saying, “Hey, I can find someone who wouldn’t have a security detail and still make national news doing it.” That’s a worrisome trend if that is actually a trend.
Middle East Conflict
Anne Kim: I want to turn now to what’s happening in the Middle East. On Friday, Israel launched a surprise attack against Iran. And the stated goal was to target Iran’s nuclear program. But since then, they’ve been also going after the oil infrastructure as well. They’ve struck more than 250 targets, I think, at this point, decapitated Iran’s military. Iran has struck back. At least 13 civilians now killed in Israel. And all of this was happening just as Trump was supposed to be negotiating with Iran over its nuclear weapons program. And now they’ve canceled scheduled talks.
It seems that the United States seems a little bit paralyzed. Trump is kind of at a loss of what to do. What’s your guys’s read on where this conflict is headed?
Matthew Cooper: I think Trump’s sort of impotence has been laid bare and it’s not entirely owing to Trump. There are limits to American power, but the Russians and the Ukrainians have both kind of blown him off in various ways to his demands, the Iranians and the Israelis have blown off his varying demands and they’re both going at it with each other long after Trump promised that he could bring both conflicts to an end by simply being strong and cutting a deal. Well, obviously that hasn’t happened and he’s proven unable to contain it. Now, maybe no president could have, but he had the audacity to claim that he could. And so here we are. So I’m sort of struck by that on the domestic side.
And I’m not totally surprised that this happened on the Israeli side. The Iranian capacity to respond had been severely weakened through the war in Gaza, the audacious Israeli attacks in Lebanon, including the pager intel surprise, which I think foreshadowed in some ways the Ukrainian attack on Russia and this incredible series of inside Iran attacks that Israel was able to sponsor this time. If Israel was ever going to do this, they had an administration that would not try to shut them down at all, unlike they could in Washington, and they had diminished Iranian capacity. I’m not totally shocked this happened now. That doesn’t make it any less tumultuous or dangerous.
Paul Glastris: It does underscore Israel’s intel capacity. They are hitting all kinds of targets that you can’t hit without on the ground knowledge. And we know Israel’s intel capacity was very questionable when they failed to anticipate and quickly respond to the Hamas attack.
But this is a very strong showing by Israel. And Matt’s right. If you’re going to press for degradation of Iran’s nuclear capacity, doing so after the world monitoring forces have said, “Hey, Iran is lying. It’s actually cranked up. It’s moving closer to a warhead”—that kind of gave the Netanyahu government carte blanche to move now, or at least a reason to move now.
And so what we’re seeing in Israel is more than just degradation of Iran’s military nuclear capabilities. As you mentioned, Anne, they’re going after their oil, they’re going after individuals and pretty openly trying to foment regime change. If that happens, “Katie, bar the door,” we have a new Middle East. That might be a great thing. That might be a horrendous thing because things can always get worse.
Donald Trump is one day telling Israel, “absolutely don’t do this.” And the next day saying to Iran, “see, this is what you get when you don’t deal with me.” And it’s all bluster, at least so far, although there may be a potential for a deal here now that Iran is on the ropes, who knows.
Anne Kim: The big question here at this point is how much the US gets involved and what’s happening on the ground. I fear that DOD is not up to the task. I don’t know if you guys saw this really devastating New York Magazine profile over the weekend of Pete Hegseth. It was titled “Playing Secretary.” And it really portrayed this guy who was obsessed with leaks and the culture war and kind of cosplaying the job. And my favorite quote from this article was, quote, “it was clear from the beginning which parts of the job Hegseth most enjoyed: working out, posting about working out and discussing the imminent removal of trans service members.”
Do you guys think that Hegseth hangs on to his job given the actual prospect of war in several parts of the world?
Matthew Cooper: I don’t think it’ll be war that undoes him, I think it’ll be that parade. If Trump feels like the parade didn’t succeed, I think that’ll be a big strike against Hegseth. I don’t know. If he does have the drinking problem that’s been written about that can certainly limit one’s longevity in this job, but the incompetence is such that the State Department was scrambling yesterday to find a way to re-up the VOA Farsi service to get some Iranian broadcasters back on the air, and they’re running the feed from One America News. Yeah, Hegseth is the apex of incompetence.
Paul Glastris: There’s a lot of incompetence to go around, but yeah. And I hope that he’s gone soon. I think he would have been gone a long time ago had Trump not wanted to look like an idiot for having put him there in the first place. They’ve got to get rid of him. This is extremely dangerous. And it’s not just that he’s an idiot and a vain, vindictive guy with no experience running anything large and what experience he does have running small operations does not inspire confidence because he ran both of them into the ground. It’s that there’s no leadership around him. He’s forced out people he’s brought. He brought with him, as this devastating New York magazine profile explains, he’s now got his wife and personal lawyer—that troika is kind of running the Pentagon now.
And he has no chief of staff. He doesn’t trust any of the uniformed military. And it’s just, I can’t think of a more dangerous moment in my lifetime to have the Pentagon with no effective leadership. And if something goes wrong, I don’t know how we respond.
Bill Scher: And I can’t know the answer to this, but perhaps at some point in history we’ll be able to figure it out. If we had more effective leadership at the Pentagon, as well as the State Department, would there have been a way to dissuade Israel from taking this action? Would there have been a way to substantively explain to them what the consequences would be? Obviously, Israel is feeling very cocky. They’ve snubbed the world wagging its finger at its choices after October 7th and basically have the approach that international laws and norms are irrelevant. They can go well beyond—obviously Israel had every right to defend itself in response to what Hamas did, but they went well beyond that in its response to October 7th. And from their short-term perspective, the government still exists and Hamas has been rolled back. Well, that worked from that short-term perspective. So let’s keep doing it. And that doesn’t account for…
Paul Glastris: And oh, by the way, it keeps Netanyahu in power because if he stops the war, any one war, then he faces the voters.
Bill Scher: Right. So, but we’re not seeing a lot of analysis about what happens six months from now, a year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. People in this region have long historical memories. And you might degrade missile capacity but you’re going to lead to a wave of asymmetric terrorist activity several years down the line that could affect not just Israel but America as well. I just have no knowledge of what extent this was even thought about or communicated by American officials and how that might differentiate between when Israel had these inclinations and the Obama people were around or the Biden people were around.
Paul Glastris: Yeah, let’s also remember, Barack Obama had Iran in a nuclear weapons treaty that had stopped their advancement. Had Trump not blown that up, we would not be in this position. Conservatives will disagree with that, and they can have at it, but it’s Trump all the way down in the sense that…
Bill Scher: Well, and Trump has essentially tacitly acknowledged this because he wanted to get a deal himself. He thinks it was a good idea to have a deal where Iran’s nuclear energy—where they still got nuclear energy and it was kept from being made into weapons. There was a difference in what Trump wanted. The Obama deal was “Okay, Iran, you can enrich uranium at low levels in Iran, but we have to have rigorous inspections.” And actually, if you go way back to the 2016 campaign, the first time Donald Trump was asked about this, it was by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. Trump’s response was, “I don’t love this deal, but I will police that deal.” That was his initial response. I will police that deal. At heart, he is a deal guy, and not a war guy. He likes the ribbon cutting.
Matthew Cooper: He’s a deal guy. Right, I mean, he’s a terrible negotiator.
Bill Scher: Yeah, but he likes to be there at the ribbon cutting ceremony. So he doesn’t like the idea of presiding over a big multi-year war, which you really can’t control at the end of the day. So he pulls out of the deal in 2018, leads to Iran ramping up its weapons capacity, getting us to this brinkmanship point here. And Trump’s response was, “Okay, I don’t want to do the Obama deal per se. But how about we let you enrich uranium out of country? We’ll do it for you. But you’ll get the energy.” I mean, look, if you could get that deal, I’d take it.
Paul Glastris: But Iran has said no to that.
Matthew Cooper: I mean, look, he is just bad at this in a lot of ways. I recall that before the fall of Afghanistan, he’d invited the Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of September 11th to hammer out an accord. He gets swindled at most of these things.
Paul Glastris: Speaking of Obama, Bill had a column on Friday pointing out that Obama did a better job of deporting truly problematic undocumented immigrants with a system that focused on those with serious criminal records and who had only recently come across the border. Trump blew that up and went after people who have been here for decades. It blew up in his face. And it was over the weekend—he said, “My God, there’s all these undocumented workers on farms and in restaurants, and they’ve got families and they’ve been here for years. I don’t wanna go after them.”
So, as if this was a new revelation to him, as if he never thought about it before. We all keep going back to Obama having gotten it right the first time.
