Why does half of America support this nightmare? | Will Bunch Newsletter

One week to go. The one positive thing — in a very weird way — about the final days of the 2024 campaign is that Donald Trump and his goons are not shying away from telling the American people who they really are. That was in full bloom Sunday at Madison Square Garden, at what one pro-Trump speaker — perhaps joking, perhaps not — called “a Nazi rally.” Whatever you think you would have done to stop the spread of fascism in 1939, it’s what you are doing right now.

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If you grew up during the baby boom era, as I did, you almost certainly had neighbors on your street and probably family members who fought in World War II to defeat fascism in Europe and Japanese imperialism. The notion of rounding up thousands if not millions of human beings and shipping them to overcrowded makeshift detention camps was seen as the kind of thing that America went to war to defeat, not something that could happen here.

I don’t need to tell you that times have changed. “Americans split on idea of putting immigrants in militarized ‘camps’” was the shock headline from Axios last week, referring to the 47% who told pollsters that Donald Trump’s primary policy proposal for a second term is a swell idea. (That number included 75% of white evangelical Christians, presumably asking themselves, ”Who would Jesus deport?”) When I covered a Trump rally in Latrobe, Pa. earlier this month, Trump’s call for mass deportation was the biggest applause line, by far. (Sorry, Arnold Palmer.)

But how many of the Americans cheering for such a plan have given much thought about how mass deportation works? Or what it might do to their community? Trump throws the red meat of his xenophobia to his followers every night, but never reveals the ingredients.

The writer Radley Balko — who was years ahead of the pack on the issue of militarized policing in America — wrote in his newsletter back in May that Trump’s call to deport 15 million immigrants would round up more people than experts believe are currently in the United States without documentation (likely closer to 11 million). To reach that target, Trump’s mass deportation would likely include millions now here legally — the “Dreamers” brought to America as children, others currently with protected status such as Haitians, even family members of the undocumented.

The 15 million figure, Balko noted, is larger than the entire population of Pennsylvania. It would be the largest forced migration of human beings since — you guessed it — World War II. The size of the operation to deport this many people would be similarly unbelievable. He noted that the most conservative cost figures for deportation bring a price tag of at least $210 billion, or more than we spend on the entire U.S. Army. The logistics of buses, housing, and other necessary infrastructure both for migrants but also Trump’s deportation army are incomprehensible.

“You don’t even try something like this unless you aspire to have an authoritarian government behind you,” a Tennessee immigrant-rights advocate, Lisa Sherman Luna, told Balko. “You’re talking about soldiers marching through neighborhoods across the country, pulling families out of their homes.”

Experts told another journalist, the Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein, that no existing jails could hold such a large number of deportees and some would likely be held in abandoned warehouses or shopping malls, even before they were shipped to the proposed detention camps located on the southern border. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of federal agents or troops necessary for such large-scale deportation, Trump’s programs would require billions of dollars more for new immigration courts even as the current ones are hopelessly backlogged, not to mention the exorbitant cost of housing detainees and the fleet of aircraft to eventually fly them elsewhere.

Taxpayers would be expected to fund this operation even as the loss of so many migrants currently in productive jobs would cripple the economy, shrinking the gross domestic product and triggering the kind of recession that was feared — and yet avoided — during the Biden administration. Some experts say the economy could lose $4.7 trillion over a decade after mass deportation, maybe more. I would urge everyone to go read Balko’s piece, which lays out in chapter and verse the way that an attempt at mass deportation would unravel the American way of life.

I know what you’re probably saying at this point. Trump talked big about deportations the first time he became president in 2017, but nothing remotely on this scale actually happened. That’s true, but the abuses that we did see during those four years — such as the inhumane family separation policy at the southern border — would metastasize in a second Trump presidency. That’s largely because of Project 2025’s well-developed scheme to rid the government of balky career public servants and replace them with MAGA loyalists not just willing but eager to carry out Trump’s most extreme orders.

It’s extremely unlikely that Trump could deport 15 million people, even over the four years of his would-be presidency. But even a program that aimed and succeeded at deporting one or two million immigrants would create an unfathomable human-rights and economic nightmare on U.S. soil. We should be talking about mass deportation — not just the headline, but the reality of what it would mean to have this deportation army causing chaos in our cities — every single night. But that would-be debate is trampled by the galloping hooves of the media’s beloved horse race.

Balko told me this week that voters “need to know that deporting even a fraction of what Trump has promised would exacerbate the very problems Trump claims it would solve. Mass deportations will spike inflation and housing costs. It will make you weep at the sight of your grocery bill. And no one will be safe. There has never been a forced relocation at this scale in human history that did not come with mass suffering and death.”

He also wondered how many of the millions of Americans who currently voice support for mass deportation would change their mind if they understood the full ramifications. I wonder the same thing, and we need to start having this conversation, even as the clock rapidly ticks down toward the final buzzer. No one should be paying attention to the polls, because we all know the only thing that matters: This race is a tie, and every vote counts. We need to be laser-focused not on the odds next week, but the stakes in an election that could change our way of life.

Question: Do you think Florida is now in play with the Puerto Rico racist comic insult moment? I know Florida is a perennial disappointment for D’s. But this does seem to have broken through. — billypilgrim (@billypilgr6508) via X/Twitter

Answer: Regarding Florida and the pro-Trump “comedian” who told Madison Square Garden that Puerto Rico is a “floating island of garbage,” the answer is yes and no. I think defeating Donald Trump in his adopted home state, which has become a migration magnate for U.S.-born red voters, is still a bridge too far. But GOP Sen. Rick Scott, locked in a tight reelection battle, raced out with a denouncement of the alleged “joke” — a sure sign of trouble for him in a state with such a large Puerto Rican population. In the presidential race, Trump needs to worry more about Pennsylvania, where sizable Puerto Rican communities in Philadelphia and Allentown are already up in arms.

Last week’s question about predicting the election winner mainly revealed that newsletter readers are wracked by anxiety, just like the rest of America. Those who responded were evenly divided between those who foresee a narrow win for Kamala Harris — “I think some people who claim they’re voting for Trump will finally come to their senses due to his insanity,” Norman Braun predicted ― and those who expect weeks of utter chaos, possibly culminating in action by the Trump-fried U.S. Supreme Court. Wrote Armando A. Pandola Jr., citing all the money and vitriol: “I don’t know who will win this crazy election but I know the losers — we, the people.”

📮 This week’s question: The last-minute decisions by some major newspapers, especially the Washington Post, not to endorse in the presidential election has triggered an uproar, at least among the chattering classes. But should newspapers endorse candidates? Please email me your answer and put “Newspaper endorsements” in the subject line.

In the final week before Election Day, millions of voters in critical swing states will get one last overheated blast from the 2024 campaign issue that wasn’t: Climate change. In the key states of Arizona and Nevada, temperature records are collapsing in the hottest late October anyone can remember, including a thermometer reading of 112 degrees in Yuma. Here in Pennsylvania, as campaign door-knockers crisscross brown lawns, the driest month in Philadelphia history is reminding voters that things are not normal. And we all remember the havoc that the moist, climate-fueled Hurricane Helene wreaked upon North Carolina and Georgia.

It’s a moment when Democrat Kamala Harris could tell a powerful narrative about the contrast between her record and the position of the GOP’s Donald Trump, who clings to the idea that manmade climate change is “a scam” and had promised to roll back key environmental regulations and green-energy programs even before he invited Big Oil magnates to donate a whopping $1 billion to his campaign. Harris has called climate change “an existential threat to our species” and cast the tie-breaking vote for President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which included an unprecedented $370 billion or more to encourage Americans to buy electric vehicles or to promote solar and wind power. Polls show that two key voting blocs, young people and Latinos, highly rank climate change as a concern.

But for Harris, talking about climate change — other than a few obligatory-feeling lines in her Chicago acceptance speech and elsewhere — is the road to the White House not taken.

Like so much of the Democrat’s tightly scripted campaign for the White House, the failure to do a major event around climate change or the environment looks like a carefully calibrated decision. Her team seems to believe aggressive talk against fossil fuels might offend pro-fracking voters in Pennsylvania — despite the polls showing most voters here want natural-gas drilling either banned or rapidly phased out — or the GOP moderates she’s wooing along with Wyoming’s oil-soaked Liz Cheney. She’s making the risky assumption that young climate voters will fall in line no matter what. “The choice is so obvious that Harris doesn’t really need to say much,” the environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote in The New Yorker of the calculation. “But, if she’s elected, she’s going to have to do a lot.”

I’m worried about that, but I’m also worried that Harris and her team may wake up on Nov. 6 kicking themselves they didn’t hold as much as a town hall with environmentally minded voters to spotlight her support for climate action. The vice president’s campaign has taken young liberal voters for granted, assuming they will show up at the polls and not vote for a spoiler like the Green Party’s Jill Stein — the same dangerous gamble Hillary Clinton took in 2016. That’s troubling, but so is the crass cynicism of focus-group politics at a moment when Planet Earth is catching fire.

A weird plot twist: On this date 14 years ago, I was writing in my Daily News Attytood blog to hype an op-ed that I’d written...for the Los Angeles Times. The subject? The critical 2010 midterm elections, and the role played by Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and their last-weekend Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall. I was horrified that thousands of mostly liberals would take buses to D.C. to worship irony — instead of knocking on doors to stop a Tea Party takeover of Congress. I warned (properly, in hindsight) that the comedians were “treating the challenges of 2010 — from rising poverty to unending war in Afghanistan to global warming, which are every bit as serious as those confronted on the National Mall in 1894 or 1963 or 1969 — with little more than humor and intellectual distance.” Read the rest under this odd bloggy headline: “MLK wasn’t worried about the sitter — Attytood does the LA Times.”

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