Sargent: And that is really the Trump/Stephen Miller position right now. To go back to what he said about the Supreme Court, he’s basically putting the Supreme Court on notice, If you make us give due process to migrants, well, you’re not going to have a country anymore. Which is his coded way of saying the wrath of MAGA is going to be unleashed, because for MAGA, it’s all about preserving the country from these invaders and so forth, right? Here Trump is essentially saying straight out, This is our issue. We’re going to fight to the death on the insistence that we don’t have to give due process to migrants.

Jain: Yeah, and I think some of this comes down to the veil of invincibility that the Trump administration has been operating with. A lot of it has come down to them saying, Well, we won the election so we can do what we want. And if anything showed us from 2016 to 2020 and then 2020 to 2024, it’s that the American public forgives a lot. And while they may be, in a sense, right that the American public is inclined to forgive a lot, that’s usually not something that’s true if the economy is going poorly. Once that happens, you start losing all types of battles everywhere. Because voters, when they’re mad, [it’s] you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is also part of why you see Kamala Harris’s declining numbers throughout the campaign. It’s partly because of this: Voters are mad at Biden and they were like, Well, we’re not going to give her the benefit of the doubt on anything.

Again, the Trump–Steven Miller angle here, which is to go and deport the migrants, don’t give them due process and everything—if you had a roaring stock market and a great economy, you may be able to get away with that. But when people don’t have confidence about how you’re running the country, that’s going to extend elsewhere.