Transcript: Trumpworld Fractures over Protests as Brutal ICE Poll Hits

Because what’s actually happening is—and you can see this in Minneapolis—if there are social assumptions about diversity, about liberals not being sincere, about their belief in multiculturalism, about the effect of violence, about their own efficiency as manly men—if any of those assumptions were true, Minnesota would have cracked. But it didn’t crack. All these people came out. A broad multicultural coalition of people came out to resist the federal occupation in a way that was effective and nonviolent.

And the federal government and Trump lost the first round, but that would not have been possible if people like Miller and JD Vance’s assumption that multicultural communities are somehow less cohesive was actually true. What makes the multiculturalism or what makes multicultural communities less cohesive is racist demagogues who attack people because of who they are.

Sargent: Right. As I’ve been trying to argue on the show and did a piece on, MAGA is a much greater threat to social cohesion than immigrants are.

Serwer: Yeah, absolutely. Because they don’t believe in liberalism in the broad sense—in the rule of law and equal protection under the law. They don’t believe in those things. They believe there is a class of people whom this country belongs to, and everybody else—everybody else’s rights are conditional. And it’s a sign of weakness if you believe in equality.

Sargent: I want to come back to that. I think Trump is also trying to recast all this in another way. After the Pretti shooting, the White House rushed out to declare the killing absolutely justified—smeared Pretti in all kinds of disgusting ways. But now Trump wants to be seen a bit differently on this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We’re doing a big investigation. I want to see the investigation. I’m going to be watching over it. I want a very honorable and honest investigation. I have to see it myself.

Sargent: So, Adam, now Trump wants to appear very determined to get the full truth about this whole thing. And we have numerous top officials, including Karoline Leavitt, now refusing to call Pretti a domestic terrorist. I think they know that they’ve got a problem on their hands—that the country is not as mean and vicious and prone to absolute contempt for the victim as they calculated at the outset. What do you think of that?