To The Contrary

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: ICE agents are not wrong to think of the cell phone as a weapon.

If people can get evidence and track them and broadcast them to anyone, actually, the cell phone is a weapon.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erb.

Welcome to To The Contrary, a discussion of news and social trend from a variety of perspectives.

The Trump administration faces intense backlash following the killing of two U.S.

citizen by ICE staffers in Minneapolis.

ICE staffers killed poet Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti in what some protesters called outright murder.

These events sparked intense opposition.

Even this White House has struggled to contain GOP outrage.

Republican business leaders and some politicians are criticizing the party, and the administration has begun a partial retreat.

With us to discuss this today is historian Claire Potter, hos of the Political Junkie podcast.

Welcome to you.

Thanks for having me, Bonnie.

And I must say Claire, I'm a political junkie, so I probably need to start listening to your podcast.

I'd love to have you.

All right, so let's start with what's going on now with President Trump and what a lot of the media have begun asking the questionor saying that he's reached a tipping point, that there are so many negative things that have come out about him and so many fronts from, the, the, Jeffrey Epstein sex and young and girlsimprisoning young girls to be sex slaves to rich men to, you know, the economy being very cruel at this point to low income people that he has now blown it with so many people that they're the midterms are going to go way in the direction of the Democrats.

We don't know exactly what that means yet, but the Democrats will make significant gains.

And Republican will be tossed out on their rear for what this president has done to the country and to democracy.

Do you agree with that?

Well, I do agree with that, Bonnie.

And the numbers at this point at least don't lie.

And we are about seven months out from the midterms.

But the latest NPR PB Marist poll has Trump at a 39% approval rating, which is abou where he was after January 6th.

And that's not as low as it can go.

George W Bush went much lower in his second term, down in the low 20s, but I think the number, if you really watch, is that 51% of those polled strongly disapprove of Trump's actions.

And here's the biggie: only 30% of independent approve of the job he's doing.

And it's really if you look at how elections swing at the national level, it's the independents that are making the decision for all of us.

The people in both partie pretty much vote the party line.

What I would say is, even with Republicans, Trump is losing ground.

Only 85% of Republican approve of the job he's doing.

And that lead to all kinds of questions about whether they're even goin to go to the polls in November.

And, you know, Trump's victory in 2024 very much rested on the enthusiasm of young people and the enthusiasm of working class people who really believed his promises that he was going to do something about the economy.

I think the economy is still central.

2/3 of Republicans still think that his immigration policies are making America safer.

Again, it's independents who ar really telling the story here.

But wait, 2/3 of Americans?

Two thirds of Republicans think his immigration policies are making Americans safer.

But two thirds of those polled now, that's the independents and the Democrats therethink that ICE has gone too far.

Well, I should say that, literally what opponents of the administration have called the murders of two people.

But really, in most people's interpretation of law, these agents were not acting as law enforcement agents.

They were acting as criminals.

So, has that been enough, do you think, because we always tal about the economy, stupid, that what matters to most people most what gets them to go vote is if they're doing either really wel or really poorly in the economy.

Do you think that the deaths of two average normal Americans will change that?

I think it will, and I think it will for two reasons.

One is both of these people were white.

Both of these people were activists, yes, but they were as you're saying, middle class professional people.

They seem to be upstanding citizens.

I think what may have been mor disturbing to people, however, and, you know, let's just say, Renee Goode was killed by ICE agents, but Alex Pretti was killed by Border Patrol agents.

And Borde Patrol agents have a reputation for being far more violent, far more lawless, and almost no one ever sees them except people in Texas and Arizona and Southern California.

So it's very jarring for people to be seeing the Border Patrol doing these things on a national stage.

But I think what may have been more disturbing to a lot of Republicans was the administration's response to what happened.

People are occasionally shot by law enforcement.

It's very regrettable, but it happens, particularly since all police, all law enforcement agents are now carrying automatic weapons.

And that means that you don't just shoot one bullet, you shoot 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 at the same time.

Or 8 or 9 Or 8 or 9.

as it was the case with Mr.

Pretti.

Right.

And of course, Pretti was shot in the back when agents had full control of him.

And I think what people are seeing is less, okay, we could forgive this.

Explain this to us, Mr.

Trump.

Tell us why this happened.

And instead, what the administration did was shut the investigations down.

They lied about what happens, now it's not news that Donald Trump lies.

But they were lying about something that everybody saw.

And the Renee Good videos were somewhat confusing.

And there were many different angles people were looking at, people being sort of junior criminologists.

But the Alex Pretti thing was incontrovertible.

Everybody saw what happened.

Everybody saw that he was not waving a gun.

And so I think the fact that these incidents were not being investigated that they were being lied about, that no one in Washingto stood up and said what everybody does in such a situation, this was regrettable.

Instead, they blamed the victims, and I think that kind of penetrated in a way that other lies have not.

Now, what does that do in terms of its impact on the upcoming midterm elections?

Is theseven months is not a long period of time, but it could be a lifetime in politics.

Right.

Right.

So why do you think that what is going on out there, whatever the most important factor is, is not going to be something that the administration can turn around in the next seven months?

Well, I think Democrats are extremely motivated.

And one of the things you don' want to do going into a midterm and remember, presidents usuall lose Congress in the midterms.

Congress usually flip to some degree in the midterms.

But Democrats are highly motivated.

Democratic governors seem to be highly motivated to protect the vote.

They have also redistricted in response to Republican redistricting.

You know, I think in many ways, the governors are going to be crucial to the midterms because they will get those motivated voters to the polls and they will make sure their votes are cast and counted.

And I also think that Donald Trump's constant meandering about how elections are rigged.

Immigrants are votin when they shouldn't be voting.

His constant attempt to instill doubt in the electorate has a real impact on Republicans.

And people talked about thi in 2020, that many Republicans didn't go to the polls because they just didn't think their vote was going to be counted, and they didn't think it mattered.

Do you think it's going to be that way this time?

I think it could be.

I think Democrats are motivated.

One of the things we are seeing in these special elections and regular elections, such as Abigail Spanberger in Virginia and Mikie Sherril in New Jersey, is we are seeing a big swing in one demographic, which is the Latino vote.

And on the one hand, Latino voters, when polled, pretty much think that the border should be closed to people who do not have documents.

They pretty much agree with a more conservative position that undocumented people should not be here, that they should be deported, you know, and that really showed itself in 2024.

Latinos swung strongly to Trump.

That is a demographic that Republicans have been trying to ge since Mitt Romney lost in 2012.

And they got Latinos not exactly on immigration, but also on economic issues.

I think a lot of Latino voters are just appalled.

I mean, we see in these special elections, Democrats winning by 13 or 14 points in Trump plus one district Trump plus 17 districts.

So we're seeing Well actually, there was a CNN poll that came out that showed that there was a 24% swing against Trump among Hispanic voters, 24 points in a year.

That's huge.

Right.

There is a state Senate district in Fort Worth that had a special election that hasn't been Democratic since 1990, and the Democrat won by 14 points.

So we are seeing a highly motivated electorate here, anti-Trump electorate.

And we are seeing Latinos giving a thumbs down, I think not to deportation itself, but to the way deportation is being handled.

And it's not just the violence, it's the racial profiling.

It's the fact that many of us who are not Latino have one degree of separation from somebody who is undocumented but is here on some legal basis, that the Trump administration arbitrarily says one day is no longer legal.

So student visas, HB one visas, there are you know, a ton of work visas that exist.

And Trump just sort of arbitrarily cancels them, or the people who are on parole who are waiting for their cases to be heard they actually were here legally.

And Trump abruptly says, no, actually, I'm going to say you're not here legally.

And they start rounding them up.

So I think it is the unfairness of it.

And I would also have to say that Latino businesses are probably losing workers at a much higher rate than non-Latino businesses and Well, let's say Latino businesses an businesses such as agriculture, which whether they're owned by Latinos or not, they're heavily dependent on Hispanic labor.

That is correct.

And I would add to that, that if you look at a place like Minneapolis, Minneapolis, like most cities, has neighborhoods that are highly defined by ethnicity.

Businesses in Latino and Black neighborhoods are simply falling apart because people are afraid to leave the house and they're afraid to leave the house, even if they have papers, because people with papers are being arrested.

And deported, People who are and sent out of the country.

Exactly, exactly.

So I think there is an animus that is developing.

Plus, you add to tha the economy is very, very soft.

And Trump was elected on his supposed ability to create a strong economy.

And that's not happening.

Tell me about how videotape or streaming, and the wide proliferation of cell phones has changed politics in this country.

You alluded to it talking about, for example, the video of the Border Patrol agent pumping as many as ten bullets all together into Alex Pretti back when he was on the ground.

How is that changing American politics?

ICE agents are not wrong to think of the cell phone as a weapon.

If people can get evidence and track them and broadcast them to anyone, actually, the cell phone is a weapon to fight ICE, if not a lethal weapon.

I would also say that mobile devices and streaming have made it enormousl profitable to spread propaganda.

And so political propaganda, which, you know, if we cast ourselves back to the 2008 presidential election and the Obama campaign harnessing Facebook, there was an executive at Facebook who actually went to work for the Obama campaign, helping them use Facebook.

And in fact, that was true in the 2015 campaign for president, 2015-2016, campaign for president as well.

Trump was working with people at Facebook.

So we have thought of the political tool of social media as something that was largely about campaigning.

But what it also does is it creates an information environment.

And what we have seen on both the right and the left is political consultants making millions and millions of dollars out of spreading not just propaganda, but really alarming messages.

So one of the effects it has on politics is to keep the electorate frightened all the time.

And I think the electorate has been much more reactive.

I think it's one of the reasons we se these big swings in elections, and we will see these big swings for some time, is that people sort of respond t what is being beamed into them.

You know, be walking down the street and you get a text message from a politician saying, Claire, if you don't send me $25 right now, the First Amendment is dead.

And there's a there' a way of talking to voters now that is intende to make them reactive and angry and to vote on very base emotions, not be asked to think through the issues and see which candidate best represents their values.

So do you fear, as many people on the lef are fearing, that we are becomin an autocracy?

I thin we're skating on the edge of it.

But no.

And I have historical reasons for thinking that.

The United States is a very old democracy, and it is somewhat exceptional in that regard, that we have a constitution that is almost 250 years old, not quite.

That we have a court system and a legislative system that has remained relatively stable.

If you look at the comparison side in Nazi Germany, Weimar Germany was a very young democracy.

It only existed for about 11 or 12 years before Hitler took power.

And that was coming out of a, we should mention, a horrible econom in Germany after World War One.

People were literally pushing around wheelbarrows full of script, you know, print money, to be able to go to the bakery and buy a loaf of bread.

We don't have that problem here.

Yeah, that is absolutely right.

And I would also sa that Germany was also a country that before World War One was a monarchy.

So there was a structure there that in a sense, Hitle just stepped into and activated.

And even if you look at the autocracies of Eastern Europe or Asia part of what you see is places that never really had democracy or where the democracy, again, was so young.

You know, really, Eastern Europe didn't have real democracies until the 1990s.

So the United States actually has some bulwarks against autocracy, some of which are holding.

The court system, even though there have bee decisions people have not liked that have changed things radically.

And I'm thinking about Dobbs, for example, that has made it possible for states to make abortion unavailable to women.

Nevertheless, abortion is available in other states.

There is no federal law against abortion, and that' because you actually have to do a lot of work to take power away from the American people, and you have to do a lot of work in the context of elections that actually happen.

Now, I know a lot of people have been saying, well, Trump's just not going to allow the elections to happen.

I don't think that's true.

And Bonnie, if we can actually sort of swing back to the beginning of the conversation a little bit, Republican politicians are starting to get in the way of what Trump is doing.

And so I think it will be it is absolutely incomprehensible to me that even the governors of Republican states would let Donald Trump and elections take away state control of elections.

I just really don't believe that they'r going to allow that to happen.

And I think one of the thing that causes Americans to panic is that these similes and comparisons are sort of tossed out there like, oh, here, here's something that's the same.

Everybody has to watch out.

But what they forget i the larger historical context.

Most countries don't have 5 or 6 layers of their judicial system as we do.

Now, one of the things that Donald Trump has changed is the Department of Justice is basically not available to most Americans.

It has become Donald Trump's private law firm.

But as I understand it, the Department of Justice is wheezing like an old car at this point because so many people have been fired, so many people have left and there is so much litigation that they can't keep up with it.

So on a certain level, yes, he turned it into his own private law firm, but he also hobbled it.

And so it means that other aspects of the legal system gain strength in the absence of a federal judicial process that can actually keep moving cases forward.

What other factors do you see out there that will have a major impact, or could have a major impact on the upcoming midterm elections that we haven't discussed yet?

Measles.

I think the number of infections of measles is going up and up.

And this one's a little ironic because I don't actually think Donald Trump caused this.

I think it is the sort of post-pandemic wellness community, what they call the MAHA Moms.

But the fact that he put a person in charge of all of this, RFK Jr, who spends his entire time spouting conspiracy theories about vaccination, means that the Trump administration is going to bear the brunt of it.

And the United States is teetering on the edge of not being a country wher measles was eradicated anymore.

And, you know, we've always had measles outbreaks.

There was a big one back in the 1980s because of a vaccine that apparently lost its effectiveness.

I, I was an adult in the 1980s.

I got revaccinated because I fell into the windo of having gotten that vaccine.

But I think if measle keeps spreading and if it starts leaving the red state communities that it's in and impinging on purple states, states like Georgia, which it's in South Carolina now, it' not that far to get to Georgia.

I think a big measles outbreak will have a huge impact on the election.

I think the second thin that could have a huge impact on the election i if the crypto industry goes down and the crypto industry, as I understan it, is a highly inflated market.

It is highly corrupt As far as I can tell, the Trump administration is into it, up to their eyeballs.

And Oh yeah, I read somewhere that this was a few weeks ago that, he and his family members had already made $1.5 billion with a B in crypto since he took over his second term.

Yes.

And there was a story in the New York Times a couple of days ago that the United Arab Emirates gave him $500 million.

They just invested it in World Liberty Financial, which actually doesn't make a profit.

And so there are all of these crypto companies that are sort of hanging out there.

I think people are going to lose a lot of money.

I think people may lose a lot of money on precious metals.

If you've noticed, the precious metals futures have gone through the roof, particularly silver.

Silver, in fact, is very important to the computer industr and particularly the AI industry because it conducts electricity so well.

So I think there are a number of economic marker that we really have to look at.

In addition to that, to repeat myself, Trump was elected to fix the economy, specifically inflation.

That has not happened.

Now, Donald Trump is not responsible for the levels of inflation, which have, you know, topped 20% in the past five years.

A lot of things happened.

The pandemic happened, the Biden administration happened, but he has not cured inflation.

And in fact, prices continue to go up at an estimated 2 or 3% a year.

We're also seeing interesting things like, have you been to McDonald's lately?

Bonnie?

I'm not a meat eater, so I must say no.

Okay, so I drive a lot, so I end up at McDonald's for lunch.

Everything is smaller, everything is more expensive, and it's smaller.

Somebody handed me a chocolate milkshake the other day, and it was about three quarters the size of what a chocolate milkshake used to be.

So Its happening at the grocery store, too.

That's right, that's right.

So, you know, and I think all of us have notice at the grocery store, our bill, you know, for a week o groceries is 30 or $40 higher.

Well, someone like me can absorb that cost.

Someone who's living paycheck to paycheck cannot.

And that is going to affect the enthusiasm for Trump.

Okay.

And we will be here watching it and keeping tabs on how he's doing.

Thank you so much, Claire Potter This has been very enlightening and we would love to have you back.

That's it for this edition of To The Contrary.

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