Siegel: And the challenges facing the Republicans?

Dionne: Well, I think, No. 1: How to deal with two of their issues going south. One is prices. The other is immigration. Who knew that the president would lose support on immigration? Because, I think, that was the other key to 2024, which is to bring order to the southern border, and instead, he launched this massive campaign that went after so many people, including, by the way, people who were here legally, people who were citizens. There were killings involved. Nobody in the country wanted this. These are two big issues they have got to deal with. Go ahead, Jamelle.

Bouie: I just want to say that I totally saw this coming. I want to claim that I was very much on the. … Given what he is saying — mass deportations, we’re going to remove 20 million people — and given the reality that there’s about 11 to 12 million undocumented immigrants, that very few of them are the kind of criminals that Trump is describing. Any attempt to do mass deportations will inevitably involve deporting people who are here lawfully, people who are just working, living their lives, doing their jobs. And that the kind of militarization, expansion of ICE and Customs and Border Protection that he was calling for, was likely going to result in some pretty ugly stuff — I just want to say that, in 2024, I was like, “Yeah, that’s going to happen.”

And I think you’re right, that voters who do not have a particularly coherent view of immigration or the immigration system — I think that the typical voter probably thinks the immigration system is: You show up, there’s a line, you get in, and then you wait, and then once you’ve waited long enough, you can get some sort of legal status or citizenship. And the anger is that, “Oh, all these people are trying to skip the line.” And so, when Trump says that he’s going to bring order, I think what voters hear is that he’s going to make the line work better.

But in reality, there is no line. Our immigration system is nonsensical, and the number of people in the United States who are the kinds of folks that I think voters think, “Oh, you have to remove, dangerous criminals,” is low. And so, voters then heard a vision of immigration policy that was not going to be delivered, and then they immediately saw what was being delivered, and the reaction was, “Oh, I don’t like that.” And so, the reversal, Trump’s reversal in immigration, which I’ll note began last March — not March 2026, but March 2025 — with the controversy over Kilmar Abrego Garcia, that’s when you begin to see the inversion happen. And I think it’s 100 percent because that’s when the public began to understand that what they’re getting is not what they thought they were getting.

Dionne: Right. And I think the “I’m going to bring order to the southern border,” that’s popular. As soon as you say the words “mass deportation,” as you suggested, it inevitably leads to something like this. It doesn’t have to be this bad, but close to this bad. I think on your question about the Republican Party rebuilding, again, perhaps everything I have said is going to be wrong, and this Trump coalition is going to hold together better than I think. I just don’t see it without Trump. If you don’t have Trump, and you don’t have that same appeal to white working-class voters, or working-class voters more generally, the Republican Party is going to have to go back and try to win suburban moderates and moderate conservatives.