Politics

Why Trump supporters see sunshine in Trump’s dark and foreboding speeches

Published

1 year ago

January 20, 2025

The first time Donald Trump gave an inaugural address, official Washington winced.

It was a scorching and dystopian assessment of what he cast as a country in ruins — this “American carnage,” Trump said. And it was, as George W. Bush reportedly called it, “some weird shit.”

But that’s not how much of Trump’s MAGA base remembers it. Like Trump, they, too, saw a hollowed-out nation in 2017. But what Trump’s supporters mostly recalled in the president-elect — and the repeat performance they are preparing for on Monday — is redemption.

Phillip Stephens, the Republican Party chair in Robeson County, North Carolina, which shifted sharply toward Trump in November, said that what he heard from Trump in 2017 was “a lot of hopeful stuff.” And James Dickey, a former chair of the Texas Republican Party, remembered “feeling positive.”

Fixing “the degradation that we all saw and were living through … that was all part of fulfilling the Make America Great Again promise,” he said.

For the base, Dickey said, it was “refreshing.”

And if Trump’s first inaugural address was lacking in the traditionally conciliatory rhetoric of victory, his loyalists weren’t missing it that year — or expecting him to change course.

“We can talk about unity, but you know, those that are against him just aren’t going to do it,” said Sally Kizer, an organizer of a tea party group in Arizona’s Yuma County. “He’s got so many things he wants to do.”

Trump is leaning on Ross Worthington and Vince Haley, who helped shape his speeches during the campaign, to craft his inaugural address, according to two people familiar with the process and granted anonymity to describe preparations. However other advisers, including immigration hawk Stephen Miller, will have a hand in it. The president-elect told NBC News on Saturday that the theme of the speech would be “unity and strength, and also the word ‘fairness.’”

It’s that last word that may be instructive. Trump said, “Because you have to be treating people fairly. You can’t just say, ‘Oh, everything’s going to be wonderful.’ You know, we went through hell for four years with these people. And so, you know, something has to be done about it.”

As for unity, that’s the kind of rhetoric his advisers suggested he would offer before his first inaugural eight years ago, too. And it’s hard to find anyone, Republican or Democrat, who expects him to follow through.

“Do I think it will on net be negative? Yeah,” said Jason Roe, a Republican strategist in Michigan and former executive director of the state’s Republican Party, who was critical of Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election following his defeat that year. “I do think it will be, for Trump, more positive than normal, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Trump speech that I came away from saying, ‘Oh, that was a very hopeful speech.’”

While Trump will likely convey to Republicans “some optimism about the mandate and the opportunity” of a second Trump term, Roe said, “It’s hard to call that positive. It’s like, yeah, let’s go punch these fuckers.”

Which is exactly the kind of rhetoric that animated his supporters in the first place — and that was so breaking with custom in his first inaugural address. In that speech, Trump blistered Washington and a decaying nation of rampant crime, “mothers and children trapped in poverty” and “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones.” It was an aberration for an inaugural address ranking “on a scale of 1 to 10, about an 11,” said Russell Riley, the co-chair of the presidential oral history program at the University of Virginia.

Since then, Trump’s oratorical range has plunged to even lower registers.

At 78 and following two impeachments, one defeat, a raft of criminal cases and two apparent assassination attempts, his rhetoric has grown angrier and more rambling over time. In his campaign rallies last year, he demonized migrants and minority groups in racist and xenophobic diatribes.

“The sense you get from the campaign rhetoric is everything is bad, it’s corrupt, it’s rotten,” Riley said.

He cited Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and George Wallace, who brought their own “coarse contributions to rhetoric. But nothing like what we’ve experienced in the last 10 years or so.”

Much of that is Trump’s contribution. But in some ways, Riley said, “what he was doing was surfing the wave. He discovered that sort of coarsened rhetoric worked, so he took part in it, and he showed you could be successful politically for taking part in it. So these two things, they interact with one another, they build on one another. Presidential rhetoric always participates in the broader trends in the culture.”

There is another trend in the culture, too — our partisanship — reflected in Trump’s polarizing remarks in 2017, and likely again on Monday. He will take office amid contentious Cabinet appointment hearings. On Wednesday, Joe Biden — hardly an eloquent speaker, but not a crass one, either, at ease invoking Seamus Heaney or William Butler Yeats — warned in his grim farewell address of a democracy-threatening “oligarchy” in America.

Trump, said Ken Khachigian, a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter, would be well served to deliver a straightforward and restrained address. But it would be nonsensical, he said, for him to give a speech about this being “a time for warmth and unity, when hardly anybody means it.”

Even if he did deliver such an address, Khachigian said, “24 hours later [Chuck] Schumer’s going to have his stiletto out and try to cut his guts open.”

Political discourse in America, he said, has devolved into “a lot of anger all the time.”

Trump capitalized on that public sentiment in his campaign. And when it comes to anger in his speech-making, he’s on a planet of his own. It’s unclear what policies he will discuss on Monday. But he has promised to deport millions of immigrants starting on “Day One.” He has pledged to dismantle whole swaths of the bureaucracy and called forrevenge on his political enemies, including by prosecuting them.

“His inaugural address might be a reading of arrest warrants,” mused David Blaska, a former Dane County, Wisconsin, supervisor who worked as a speechwriter for former GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson and who supported Trump in 2020, but not in 2024.

“Part of the rapture,” Blaska said, “is that the sinners are cast into hell.”

Dasha Burns contributed to this report.

Politics

Furious allies lobby Trump to keep deporting migrants

Published

1 hour ago

March 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal.

A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.

The new poll was conducted by McLaughlin & Associates, a pollster that Trump has used in all of his presidential elections, and shared exclusively with POLITICO. It found that 66 percent of likely 2026 voters support deporting any migrants who enter the country illegally. When asked if they support deporting all deportable migrants, not just violent criminals, a majority (58 percent) say they do.

Eighty-seven percent of Trump 2024 voters surveyed, including 79 percent of Hispanic Trump voters, want the president to exceed the previous largest deportation effort in history, led in the 1950s by former President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“Overwhelmingly, Trump voters expect this from the administration. They don’t just support it, they expect it,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, which advocates for conservative immigration policy. “This is a good way to re-energize the base as we move into the midterms, the same way that Trump was able to do so in the lead up to the 2024 general election.”

The new coalition includes Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump; Erik Prince, a Trump ally and former Blackwater CEO; as well as a number of conservative think-tanks and lobbying groups close to the Trump administration including the Heritage Foundation, Federation for American Immigration Reform American Moment, and the Claremont Institute.

Morgan, who also served as chief of the U.S. Border Patrol under both former President Barack Obama and Trump, said a deportation strategy that involves targeting only violent criminals, gang members or terrorists for deportation is “a Clinton-Obama-Biden policy. And it’s historically been a disastrous failure.”

The campaign comes as other Republican strategists and lawmakers warn Trump’s mass deportation agenda is becoming increasingly unpopular following ICE operations in Minnesota that killed two U.S. citizens, and could hurt the party’s chances of retaining control of Congress.

Since then, the administration has pivoted its message on immigration enforcement while overhauling its leadership at DHS. Border czar Tom Homan replaced CBP chief Greg Bovino in Minneapolis and drew down the immigration enforcement presence there; the president ousted DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last week and tapped Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to replace her; and even Trump, in his State of the Union address, focused mostly on border security and deporting violent criminals.

On Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair instructed House Republicans to curb their hardline rhetoric and instead focus on removing violent criminals. Blair doubled down in a post on X, writing thatRepublicans are focused on “deporting the violent/criminal illegals that Joe Biden & the Democrats in Congress let in.”

Those comments angered members of the coalition, who say taking a “worst of the worst” approach to deportations is not a winning policy.

Still, the coalition’s poll results differ drastically from other recent polling on immigration: A January POLITICO poll found that nearly half of U.S. adults say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 of his 2024 voters. AFebruary NPR/PBS/Marist poll found that 65 percent of U.S. adults think Immigration and Customs Enforcements has gone too far in enforcing immigration laws.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson denied that the White House has shifted its deportation approach.

“Nobody is changing the Administration’s immigration enforcement agenda,” Jackson said. “President Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of illegal alien criminals who endanger American communities. As the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly said, approximately 70 percent of deportations to date have been illegal aliens with criminal records. Thanks to President Trump’s strong immigration enforcement policies, approximately 3 million illegals have left the United States, either through forced deportation or self-deportation, with zero illegals coming through the most secure border in U.S. History for nine straight months.”

According to an internal DHS document obtained by CBS News, less than 14 percent of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s first year in office had violent criminal records.

Hispanic GOP lawmakers have recently lobbied DHS and the White House, expressing concern that the aggressive deportation approach could alienate the Hispanic voters that helped secure Trump’s victory in 2024. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) acknowledged those concerns Tuesday, telling reporters that there has been a “hiccup” with some Hispanic and other voters who view DHS’ approach as “overzealous.”

“Everybody can describe it differently, but here’s the good news,” Johnson added. “We’re in a course-correction mode right now.”

But the Mass Deportation Coalition is hoping its poll — which was commissioned by Chmielenski’s Immigration Accountability Project and conducted between Feb. 27 and March 3 — will course-correct that course correction. The online survey had a sample of 2,000 likely voters and a margin of error of 2.2 percent.

Chmielenski said he views the first year of Trump’s term as “phase one” of this deportation push, and now wants to see the administration enter “phase two”: by focusing on worksite raids, targeting any deportable individual and reaching 1 million removals in 2026. The Department of Homeland Security said it deported more than 600,000 individuals in 2025.

“Now that we’re a year into the administration, the public sentiment hasn’t changed,” Chmielenski said. “We still believe the Trump administration … has a mandate on mass deportations.”

Politics

Tillis says DOJ probe of Powell ‘reaching the point of the absurd’

Published

9 hours ago

March 12, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Tillis says DOJ probe of Powell ‘reaching the point of the absurd’

The North Carolina Republican said Fed chair nominee Kevin Warsh “possesses impeccable credentials and a clear vision for maintaining the Fed’s independence…
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