Transcript: Trump-MAGA Rage at Mexico Takes a Dark, Menacing Turn

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 29 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Now that Donald Trump has threatened 25 percent tariffs on all goods the United States imports from Mexico, Trump’s MAGA allies have gotten the memo: The new enemy is Mexico. One top MAGA ally is claiming that Mexico should prepare for a U.S. military invasion. Another says that if Mexico doesn’t do Trump’s bidding, “pain and suffering will ensue.”

All this comes after Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, hit back at Trump’s threat in a sharply worded statement. Trump’s propagandists are already laying the groundwork to cast Mexico as a major scapegoat for U.S. social problems, thus justifying in advance whatever Trump throws at Mexico in the way of threats and bullying and tariffs and whatever else. Today, we’re going to try to figure out what this all means and how bad it could get with one of the best observers of immigration and border issues out there, Douglas Rivlin of America’s Voice. Thanks for coming back on, Doug.

Douglas Rivlin: Thanks, Greg.

Sargent: The latest is that Trump threatened tariffs to get Mexico to stop migrants and fentanyl from coming. Claudia Sheinbaum responded by saying that Mexican security forces are already doing a great deal to stop migrants, and that this is a big reason border apprehensions are down sharply here this year. Doug, these are migrants coming from south of Mexico who are trying to cross Mexico to get to the U.S. border, and Mexico is stopping them. Can you talk about this situation? What’s really going on with it?

Rivlin: The story of this year on the border is that the traffic is down by 75 percent. Mexico is doing things like busing potential migrants from the north to the south, giving them the opportunity to apply for asylum in Mexico and filling up detention centers that they’re newly building.

I was down visiting shelters a couple of years ago. The shelters really would help migrants apply for asylum in Mexico, would help them navigate how you would come legally to the U.S. using the CBP One app, give them health and safety screenings because it’s a dangerous trip, all the different things. Now they’re building detention centers—they were building them when I was there—and now they’re filling them up. So Mexico is already doing a lot of what Trump wants them to do, and it was done by negotiation and by diplomacy rather than by tweet and belligerence.

Sargent: I want to clarify for people that it was President Biden’s diplomacy with Mexico, according to many experts anyway, that brought about this action by Mexico. Now let’s listen to what Scott Jennings, who’s a real MAGA loyalist, has to say about Sheinbaum and the situation. Here’s an exchange between Jennings and Washington Post writer Catherine Rampell, in which Rampell points out the basic facts about the situation that we just discussed. Listen to how Jennings responds.

Catherine Rampell (audio voiceover): Mexico has actually put a lot more border security on its southern border.

Scott Jennings (audio voiceover): It’s really working wonders.

Rampell (audio voiceover): Again, border crossing is down 75 percent. They’re back to what they were under Trump.

Jennings (audio voiceover): If I were her, I would be prepared for my country to possibly have United States military incursions to take out the drug factories and the people who do this.

Rampell (audio voiceover): You think we should not only have a trade war, we should have a military war?

Jennings (audio voiceover): I think we have to do what we have to do.

Sargent: Note that Jennings has nothing whatsoever to say in response to the facts that Rampell lays out. He just defaults to threatening military action against drug organizations and importantly, he says that Sheinbaum should get ready for this military action. So that means he’s saying the U.S. should act without Mexico’s consent.

Rivlin: Look, we have to have a cooperation on the border, which is obvious. The problem is on both sides of the border. The demand is on this side for drugs, and that’s what’s feeding the money and the guns going south, as President Sheinbaum pointed out in her response to Trump.

Look, they want a simplistic answer to a very complicated set of questions, and they don’t want to have to admit to any U.S. culpability. They just want to play cartoon tough guy versus bad guy. The reality is sending in airstrikes into Mexico is going to make things a lot worse. Putting 25 percent tariffs on the economy in Mexico is going to make things a lot worse. From the American point of view in terms of if more people are going to need to leave Mexico, it just doesn’t make any sense. But sense is not what they’re trying to make. They’re trying to make public opinion and rattle sabers so that the MAGAs feel like they’re being tough.

Sargent: Right. They’re really trying to make it clear that what they will not allow to be true is that cooperation and diplomacy can solve some of these problems. They are simply erasing the fact that diplomacy is already solving, to some degree anyway, the migration problems across the border—and instead saying none of that exists, Mexico’s screwing us by letting people just traipse across our border in enormous hordes of world historical invasion. And the only thing that can solve this problem is Trump being tough with threats. That’s the MAGA worldview. Cooperation, diplomacy, none of that can actually solve problems ever. If it is solving problems, we will simply pretend it’s not happening and proceed with our threats.

Rivlin: He’s looking to create enemies and straw men to knock down and to be tough against. He’s not seeing our neighbors, either in Canada or in Mexico or anywhere else around the world, as our allies and as our friends and as people who will work with us to solve problems. He’s not interested in solving problems. He’s interested in exploiting problems for his own personal adulation and also for his own personal profit.

Sargent: We actually have MAGA personalities openly fantasizing about what Trump will do to Mexico if it doesn’t do what Trump wants to stop migrants and fentanyl from coming in. Never mind again that Mexico’s already doing a lot to stop migrants from coming. And on fentanyl, a huge percentage that crosses the border comes through official ports of entry which the U.S. oversees, not via illegal border crossings. Trump and MAGA are full of shit on that as well.

Media Matters flags this example of big MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk the other day saying that Trump’s threats send a message to Mexico, that “if you don’t fix this, pain and suffering will ensue.” This is pretty dangerous stuff, isn’t it? For an entire movement behind the president to be openly fantasizing about the pain and suffering that Trump is going to impose on Mexico if it doesn’t do his bidding?

Rivlin: It’s very dangerous, both from not addressing the problem—because there really are problems with drug abuse and overdoses in this country—and also from the point of view of people seeing violence as the response to immigration. Trump keeps saying, It’s an invasion. There’s a whole Heritage Foundation and other apparatus around trying to make the term invasion stick, and they will take certain war powers against noncitizens if they can get that definition applied to immigrants.

We have a lot of MAGA followers who are well-armed, and occasionally they take up those arms and they go shoot a lot of people. A number of them have done that already on the sense that we are being “invaded.”

The shooter at the Pittsburgh Synagogue Tree of Life was trying to end the invasion by killing worshippers at a synagogue. Killing grocery store people at a Buffalo supermarket because they were trying to stop the invasion. And the case in Walmart in El Paso where 23 people were killed with an assault rifle was because the guy said, Mexico is invading us and I have to go do something to stop it. When you’re being invaded, military action and taking up arms doesn’t sound that unreasonable. So they’re really pushing that message, and some of their followers take it to the next level.

Sargent: It’s interesting what you’re saying here. The different MAGA tropes interlock with each other and reinforce each other, right? There’s the invasion trope in which American native-born voters are being replaced by invaders, “great replacement theory” meaning migrants. Then on the other side, there’s also Trump saying, I’m going to use the military to carry out mass deportations—you’re using the military because you’re being invaded. The two end up reinforcing each other. And the end result of it is a picture in which migrants are an alien invading force that must be countered with military force.

Rivlin: It runs up against reality. Everybody who’s having Thanksgiving dinner this week is having food on their table that has passed through the hands of immigrant farm workers—many of whom don’t have legal status because we just don’t have a legal system for allowing those workers to come here and work, even though on every single table in the U.S., that food is going to be consumed this week.

On fentanyl: Ninety percent of the people who are arrested bringing fentanyl into the country are U.S. citizens bringing it in in vehicles through ports of entry. So 90 percent of the folks who are bringing it in are U.S. citizens, and 100 percent of the folks who are using it are U.S. citizens, right? There’s just a huge demand for drugs in this country that’s fueling Mexico’s drug industry. We’re acting to try and destabilize that by taking out their leaders, but we’re not addressing the underlying problem, which is we’ve got people who want drugs in this country and they’re willing to send money and guns south to get it. That is enormously destabilizing, not just in Mexico, but throughout the world.

Sargent: Yeah. Here’s another good example of the MAGA fantasies we’re talking about here. Laura Ingraham said on Fox that there’s this new caravan that Mexico is doing nothing to stop. Absolute nonsense again. But in response, Eric Trump on Fox said that his father’s threatened tariffs will fix the situation, claiming that we will cost your countries, your economies, your businesses billions of dollars if you don’t act because my father is so damn tough.

What’s also going on here is that if border apprehensions remain low once Trump takes over, Trump and MAGA are going to take credit for it and say that their threats toward Mexico now forced it to take action, showing how Trump’s alleged strength paid off. But again, Mexico’s already acting.

Rivlin: We’re in a post-fact world, right? In MAGA world, crime is way up, but it’s not. In MAGA world, crime is way up because of immigration, but it’s not. In MAGA world, if you bring in more immigrants, that means fewer jobs for American, and it’s exactly the opposite of that.

Sargent: Well, it’s fiction. It’s a fictional universe. Think of this, Doug. This is a long running problem among Republicans for the longest time. Republicans have been going down to the border and these fat white guys who are in their sixties and seventies putting on military garb and riding on some boat. It’s like something out of a Call of Duty video game or something like that.

Rivlin: It’s GOP congressional cosplay where they dress up in camo that their aide just bought for them at the outdoor store and they go down there and they get on Fox. And it works. They’re going around the river in a gunboat while, at the same time, there’s a tourist boat going right by them. It is silly but it works. If you keep up that talking point long enough, in that media environment, people believe you and people end up voting in that way. That’s something that the Democrats and the media have not figured out how to counter.

We are in a world where Trump shapes reality and then shapes the response to that reality to put himself in a good light. I just don’t think we figured that out yet. He’s brilliant at it. But in the end, we’re looking at some really big problems. With everything he’s considering doing with Mexico that is going to increase migration, and it’s going to increase it when we don’t have any visa programs to actually make sure that that’s happening legally.

What Trump was really effective at in his first term was actually eliminating legal immigration so that more of the immigration was going to the border and coming between ports of entry. We suspect he’s going to do a lot of the same things. The goal from Trump’s point of view is to make legal immigration next to impossible for everyone and impossible for most people and then rail against the illegalities so that he looks strong. It’s not the way to solve our border issues; it’s not the way to solve our immigration issues.

Sargent: I do want to pick up on something you said about Democrats not figuring this out. Democrats seem to have real trouble saying what you said earlier, which is immigration is good for our country. Immigrants are playing a major role in getting the food to our tables. They played a huge role as essential workers in getting us through the pandemic. Immigrants have fueled the best recovery in the world. I don’t know why Democrats have so much trouble saying that kind of stuff.

Rivlin: There’s a real hazard to try and tell people who don’t think the economy is doing well that the economy is doing well. That is just a fundamental problem. It’s a problem of inflation always getting blamed on whatever team is in the White House at the time. The reality is that we got to create the enlightened or even unenlightened self-interest around immigration. We’ve often thought of immigration as more of a machine politics issue where we’re doing it so that Latino voters will vote for the Democrats, right?

The reality is that if we want to help blue collar workers in the U.S., we need to have an immigration system that works so that people are coming with visas instead of smugglers. That means being more generous and getting more control, which is exactly what the Republicans are against. They just don’t want the people in their country, and they don’t want to have them with legal status. What we’ve found over 40 years is that actually the people come anyway, but now they don’t have legal status and so they’re more easy to exploit. They’re not covered by our labor laws. That hurts American workers over the long run.

We know that if we had a legal immigration system that started to match the needs of our economy, it would be much better both for the immigrants but also for the American worker. It would create more growth, create more jobs, put us at a strategic advantage over some of our competitors around the world who don’t have immigration like Russia and China and a lot of Western Europe.

Sargent: Absolutely. To wind this down, where do you see this going? Trump and MAGA are going to threaten Mexico endlessly, try to blame all our social problems on Mexico. At the same time, out of the other sides of their mouths, they’re going to try to take credit for anything good that happens with the apprehension numbers, even though Biden’s already brought them down. They’re going to say that there are threats toward Mexico brought this about. What’s the actual practical impact of this on the ground when it comes to Mexico–U.S. relations? What’s going to happen there?

Rivlin: I don’t know what’s going to happen. I know that there’s probably going to be a lot of buyer’s remorse when prices go up because of what Trump plans to do on tariffs and immigration. There’s going to be buyer’s remorse when we’re rounding up families and putting them in camps, and the police in one state is being diverted from actually doing police work to picking up families who have been in the country for 10 or 12 years, TPS holders, and DACA recipients. There’s going to be buyer’s remorse.

How quickly that comes is hard to tell. He is inheriting a very, very good economy. Trump, he fires off a tweet, or a true whatever they call it, in the middle of the night and he gets a 10-day news cycle out of it. You and I are talking about something that he tweeted in the middle of the night, and all of the news channels are doing the same. He’s got an ability to drive us crazy with crazy ideas and provoke people. So we have to be able to also be calm.

We have to be able to enjoy our Thanksgiving and our long weekend and our Christmas coming up. Next year is going to be really tough. It’s going to be really tough for the U.S. It’s going to be really tough for our psyches. It’s not just going to be tough for liberals like me or you, but it’s going to be tough for a lot of working-class people in this country who are going to be under assault because they thought they were buying one thing with Trump and they’re going to get something else that actually reaches deep into and steals money out of their pockets because they were distracted by race or Haitians or some other thing.

Sargent: Beautifully said, Doug Rivlin. I advise everyone to take what Doug says to heart. Enjoy your holidays because things are going to get hairy. Doug, thanks so much for coming on with us.

Rivlin: Thanks a lot.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.