Trump’s Deportations Expose the Fragility of His Coalition
In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s incredible comeback last year, there were good reasons to be skeptical of the chest-beating on the right about an enduring Republican realignment along multiracial lines .
The New York Post, to give just one example of this kind of thinking, attributed Trump’s election victory to “the most multiracial coalition the GOP’s seen in decades, maybe ever,” with Latino voters “breaking decisively to the GOP and blacks increasingly down on the Dems.”
The idea that Trump won in 2024 by building a lasting multiracial coalition is soothing to the sort of “color-blind” conservatives who are forever pining away for the mass defection of blacks from the Democratic Party—an event that is less likely to transpire than the invention of time travel. A new Pew Research survey provides fresh evidence that this analysis needs a reality check.
The survey found that four out of five Hispanics now believe Trump’s polices harm them, especially Trump’s immigration crackdown. Seventy-one percent of Hispanic adults now say that Trump is going too far with enforcement, and 52 percent are concerned that they or someone they know might be arrested or deported.
But many in Trump’s core MAGA base have the opposite worry. They fear Trump is falling short of what they view as his very clear promise to carry out the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. There is an obvious tension between the wishes of Trump’s most stalwart supporters and those of his more fair-weather allies, who chose to hear Trump’s immigration rhetoric on the campaign trail in ways that comport with their own more self-interested views. When they heard Trump bashing illegals, they assumed he meant only gang members covered in menacing tattoos.
Latinos who now feel they are under special scrutiny from ICE are not wrong to feel that way, but they are wrong to place their self-interest above the rule of law. Most illegal aliens are from Mexico and Central America. It is a simple and profound fact of the nation’s political life. That is why the Supreme Court recently decided that the federal government must be permitted to practice a limited form of racial profiling to identify deportable aliens. It would be absurd to expect immigration agents not to consider an unidentified person’s complexion or English proficiency when trying to determine their probable legal status.
This is not to say that individual ICE and Border Patrol agents have never overreached, but this should be a marginal concern in the scheme of things—particularly when millions of aliens continue to reside and work in the country illegally. Among other reasons to wish to see them removed, illegal immigrants take up a significant part of the nation’s scarce housing supply, driving up prices for everyone else and making life harder for immigrants who are here legally.
Yet the resistance to Trump’s deportations has become increasingly violent. While the “color-blind” Conservative Inc. types prefer the rhetorically safe tactic of blaming white leftists whenever possible, the perpetrators of recent attacks have often been immigrants. In Chicago, for instance, an illegal alien from Mexico was arrested for shooting at Border Patrol agents in a mid-morning drive-by attack in a Mexican-majority neighborhood. There have been numerous incidents of illegal aliens and their sympathizers using their vehicles as weapons, a trend that is very familiar to Europeans besieged by violent migrants from the Arab-Islamic world.
Certainly, MAGA should not unnecessarily alienate its Hispanic supporters. But it is also the case that the right will not find a path to long-term relevance by pathetically chasing votes from groups inclined to vote like ethnic blocs whenever push comes to shove. Indeed, we would do well to remember that Trump received less than half of the Hispanic vote. His 48 percent support is supposed to be an impressive figure for a Republican, but by itself it is nothing to stake our civilization upon.
Not wanting to paint with too broad a brush, 81 percent of Trump’s Latino voters still back him, but that is a pronounced drop from 93 percent of those voters who were still pleased with him at the start of his improbable second term. We are now almost a year into the second Trump administration, and we cannot deny that some progress is being made in the effort to reverse the left’s annihilationist project of demographic change.
Nevertheless, the broad outlines of the left’s agenda remain intact. Nor can we deny that many Hispanics want it to stay that way. Hispanics continue to be held out as natural allies to the GOP, and there is a grain of truth in that hope. But there are clear limits to this relationship, and a national populist movement like MAGA cannot be held hostage by the unreasonable demands of particular ethnic blocs.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/trumps-deportations-expose-the-fragility-of-his-coalition