MAGAReport for 6/22/24

Today: the first time I've seen the MAGAs mad at Trump, and still no organized plans for violence or demonstration

One of the more surprising news items this week was Trump’s statement that any foreign graduate of a US college should automatically get a green card. While consistency has never been all that important to Trump, this was a dramatic departure from his anti-immigrant rhetoric.

His announcement came in the midst of a few weeks of rage on the MAGA forums (directed by far-right media outlets) over immigrant crime. There have been many threads every day about sex offenses and violent crimes committed by immigrants, with enthusiastic, racist calls for mass deportations and even executions. The anti-immigrant sentiment is much higher than its base levels on the forums (which are already consistently high).

This has led to a rare event - there is almost universal condemnation of Trump over this point within the groups I monitor. (The only other moment I can thing of where there was disapproval of Trump was when he did not take more action to preemptively pardon J6ers.)

There were multiple discussion threads on this proposal with a lot of activity. For a community where political consistency is typically unimportant, this is really unusual to see. Here’s a sample of one discussion under a screen shot of Trump’s proposal:

This is not to say that some of them did not try to spin it as a genius move by Trump:

The MAGAs were not buying it, though:

It will be interesting to see how Trump continues to play this. The in-group / out-group distinction is critical to the heart of the MAGA movement, and immigrants (except for Melania, apparently) are very firmly part of the out group. One hint of how this might go is that Trump will keep up this line to appeal to more mainstream voters, while he has others tell the MAGA base that he doesn’t really mean it. This is already happening with Steve Bannon who is arguing to the base that Trump does not seriously mean immigrants should get to stay. The discussions I saw around this were largely pro-Bannon.