His latest comments about mass deportation are a revelation about how he feels—and a troubling reminder of the sources of his appeal.
Donald Trump says something crazy or vicious almost every time he speaks. It’s his nature, but it’s also a political strategy. The flow of half-demented, half-depraved talk energizes those who enjoy it—and exhausts those who are horrified by it.
The mainstream media cannot report every outrageous remark, or they would do nothing else. Even those shocking comments that do get reported tend to make just a blip. The next day, if not the next minute, Trump is telling another lie or vilifying another public servant or issuing another threat. Yesterday’s shocker is soon crushed beneath today’s, and then tomorrow’s, until it’s ancient history.
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin yesterday, Trump talked about his plans for “mass deportation” of border-crossers. “In Colorado, they’re so brazen, they’re taking over sections of the state,” he claimed, presumably alluding to reports of gang activity in an apartment building in a Denver suburb. “And you know, getting them out will be a bloody story. They should never have been allowed to come into our country. Nobody checked them.”
What did Trump mean by bloody story? He often fantasizes about unleashing state violence against groups and people he dislikes. Speaking to New York City cops in 2017, then-President Trump crowed about how “rough” immigration officers are and urged the police, “Please don’t be too nice” when making arrests. During the protests and riots of summer 2020, Trump similarly demanded that police “crack skulls” and “beat the fuck out of” demonstrators. “Just shoot them,” he repeated again and again at meetings attended by top officials, according to a book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender. And in 2023, Trump suggested on Truth Social that Mark Milley, Trump’s own former top general, deserved the death penalty. (Trump was angry because of a report in this magazine that Milley had assured Chinese military leaders in October 2020 that Trump was not going to order a sneak attack to justify keeping power after his impending election defeat.)
Trump’s first term really did see brutal and even deadly repression of illegal border-crossers, as my colleague Caitlin Dickerson has heart-rendingly reported. But Trump’s rhetorical eagerness for harm or hurt usually does not translate into real-world action. Mass deportation, in particular, has always been a dark and improbable fantasy. To round up and detain 150,000 people of Japanese descent in 1942 required dozens of assembly points and 10 full-scale internment camps operated by a specialized government agency. Trump is imagining a much more ambitious project—one that would surveil, arrest, and imprison many more people, extend across the whole country, and be followed by mass expulsions to other nations. Congress would have to rewrite laws to do away with the protections that today impede deportation, and would have to appropriate billions of dollars to pay for many more immigration officers and many more holding cells. Aircraft would have to be chartered to transport the deportees to their destinations. Diplomatic pressure would have to be applied to half the world to accept the returnees, many of whom come from collapsed states like Venezuela and Haiti or uncooperative ones like China and Russia.
Bottom line: It’s not going to happen. In office and out, Trump has often amended his immigration views to accommodate political reality and to placate wealthy business supporters. If he’s returned to power in 2024, there’s every reason to think he’d do it again. Before the coronavirus pandemic scrambled the numbers, the Trump administration actually removed fewer illegal immigrants from the interior of the country than the Obama administration before it.
Any real plan to enforce immigration would focus on the workplace. As a candidate for president in 2012, Mitt Romney argued that requiring employers to verify their workers’ immigration status would take away the incentive to immigrate illegally. Romney described his policy as “self-deportation”: “The illegal immigrants would themselves decide they can do better by going home, because they can’t find work here, because they don’t have legal documentation to allow them to work here. And so we’re not going to round people up.”
Trump’s “bloody story” talk is not a guide to what a hypothetical future Trump administration would do. A future Trump administration will be a chaos of constitutional and foreign-policy crises, incapable of any kind of considered or consistent domestic policy. Bloody story is instead a revelation about how Trump feels—and a troubling reminder of the sources of his appeal. Real-world enforcement implies real costs. Labor would become more scarce. Immigrant-dependent services would become more expensive. The roofing industry, for example, now relies heavily on the most recent immigrants, so housing would cost more. Trump never accepts trade-offs. He deals in lies and delusions, such as financing child care through supposedly free money from magic tariffs that somehow protect U.S. industry without costing U.S. consumers anything.
Above all, Trump traffics in yearnings for punishment of people he regards as outsiders and inferiors. They will suffer, they will shed blood, they will pay—and somehow their pain and their loss will elevate and empower him and those who support him. It’s never true, but for a moment it feels good. What more vivid form of power is there than the power to inflict pain?
