President Trump told 60 Minutes his deportation policy was "too tough" — and the establishment press immediately branded it a retreat from his signature issue. What it actually is: an honest admission that removing millions of illegal aliens carries political costs the same open-border crowd always weaponizes to block enforcement.
After Republicans lost both chambers of Congress in last week's midterms, Trump sat down with CBS's Ross Douthat and conceded that deporting people whose only offense was entering the country illegally hurt him politically. The Guardian called it "one of his clearest public retreats." The New York Post said he "backs away." BBC framed it as "an abrupt change in tone." But the same day the interview aired, DHS told the BBC flatly: "ICE is NOT backing away or slowing down." And on Friday, Trump promoted Stephen Miller — the architect of the mass deportation policy — to White House chief of staff. That's not a retreat. That's a president reading the political map.
The midterms were a bloodbath. Democrats flipped Senate seats in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Texas, Maine, and both Carolinas. As HotAir noted, Kansas hadn't sent a Democrat to the Senate in nearly a century. Latino voters who broke for Trump in 2024 reversed course: only one in three voted Republican in House races, per the AP Voter Poll cited by the Post. Commentator Samantha Karlin told the Post the crackdown meant voters watched "people who look like you, your family, and your neighbors being targeted by aggressive immigration enforcement."
Trump's assessment was blunt: "I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally." He gave himself an "A+" for sealing the border — "nobody came in through our southern border" in 17 months, he claimed, versus "25 million" under Biden-era caravans — and "very high marks for getting the bad ones out." But he acknowledged the damage from removing people who are, as he put it, "good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel" and "in some cases, paying taxes."
He proposed a deal: target killers, rapists, and drug dealers for removal while negotiating status for long-term residents. "Let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them," Trump said. "I think that's something that's actually doable." He said some on the "pretty far right" — including in his own administration — "would like everybody taken out."
The press wants you to read this as capitulation. Here's what they bury: mass deportation was always going to require force, resources, and collateral consequences that the same media would exploit to paralyze enforcement. Federal agents fatally shot two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, during ICE operations in Minneapolis this year, the Guardian reported. That's the cost of serious enforcement. The question isn't whether it's tough. It's whether the people now screaming "too tough" ever wanted any enforcement at all.
The same establishment that spent four years insisting the border was secure, that any enforcement was cruelty, that "undocumented" migrants were just seeking a better life — those voices opened the border, created the crisis, and now want credit for noticing the cleanup is messy.
Trump says a deal with Democrats is "doable." The last time Washington cut an immigration deal — the 1986 amnesty — enforcement promises were broken, 3 million got legal status, and the border stayed wide open. What makes anyone think this time is different?
