Trump’s Fury at Gavin Newsom Backfires—and Reveals His Own Weakness

Those revelations come in this report in The Wall Street Journal, which says that in May, top Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials that Trump was displeased with lagging deportation numbers. Miller told ICE officials that they are not merely supposed to target gang members and violent criminals, and instead must “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens”:

He directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
“Who here thinks they can do it?” Miller said, asking for a show of hands.

It’s this order that inspired the ICE sweep at a Home Depot in Los Angeles that led to where we are right now, reports the Journal. And this is highly instructive.

Here’s why: MAGA, like other iterations of authoritarian and fascist politics, thrives on the invocation of a vast and implacable enemy within that requires the dramatic exercise of emergency authorities and extraordinary measures to defeat it. But executing that invocation in the first place requires what’s technically known as “making shit up.”

Thus it is that Miller and Trump spent the 2024 campaign depicting all migrants as dangerous criminals in order to sell mass deportations to the voters. Now, however, because there aren’t enough dangerous criminal migrants around, two-bit fascist Miller is frantically urging ICE officials to head to the nearest Home Depot and scoop up as many migrants as possible, to make those deportation numbers pleasing to the raging Audience of One.

The absurdity of this is plain. As Josh Marshall notes, by definition this entails targeting day laborers—that is, going after people who want to work and whose labor is in demand, meaning it inherently constitutes the opposite of hunting for dangerous criminals. Worse, Trump and Miller are not just neglecting serious criminal migrants to target more noncriminals; to do so, they’re also actively shifting law enforcement resources away from other serious crimes, from drug trafficking to child exploitation.