In a 60 Minutes interview that aired Sunday, President Trump signaled he might be open to working with a future Democratic congressional majority on immigration — a shift that should concern anyone who voted for him expecting the opposite.
Asked by Ross Douthat to name “one thing you would like to work with a Democratic [congressional] majority on,” Trump didn’t hesitate. “Immigration,” he said. “If they’re good people working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases paying taxes. And there’s a large group of people [that] think that they should be allowed to stay.”
That “large group” he’s describing is the Democratic Party. It is not the coalition that put him back in the White House.
There’s no pretending the deportation push has been painless. Some voters who backed Trump in 2024 have grown uneasy as enforcement actions have unfolded, made messier in places where Democratic officials resisted cooperating with federal agents. Unwinding a crisis involving an estimated 25 million people living in the country illegally was never going to be clean.
But the numbers don’t support backing off. An NBC exit poll from the midterm elections found voters still trusted Republicans over Democrats on immigration, 43 percent to 41 percent. That’s not a mandate to go soft — it’s a reason to hold the line.
Nothing Trump does on this issue is going to change how Democrats or the national press treat him. There is no version of a deal that stops short of blanket amnesty for everyone currently in the country illegally that Democrats would accept. And a magnanimous moment after a midterm loss won’t buy him any goodwill once the new Congress — with subpoena power in Democratic hands — is seated in a matter of weeks. They are coming after him and the people around him, and the press will cheer every step of it.
Trump himself seems to grasp this when it suits him. In a separate interview with New York Magazine, discussing his push to rename Washington, D.C. monuments and institutions after himself, he said: “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”
He’s not wrong about that. He’s term-limited, and his party just lost control of Congress. The name on the buildings and the deportations already underway are among the few levers he still controls outright. Softening his position on immigration won’t earn him any grace from people who have made clear they want him gone for good. The people who got him to the White House twice are the only constituency that’s ever actually had his back — and he shouldn’t lose sight of that now.
