Trump is talking about a Trump immigration deal with Democrats that would let some undocumented immigrants stay in the country, and he called the people who want everyone deported the “pretty far right.”
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He said it during his first sit down interview since the midterms, a conversation with Ross Douthat for CBS’s 60 Minutes that was taped Friday at the White House and aired Sunday night. Republicans took heavy losses in the midterms, and Douthat asked him straight up whether immigration hurt him.
“I think it both helped and hurt,” Trump said. He gave himself an A+ for closing the border and said he gets high marks for “getting the bad ones out.” Then he admitted the other side of it. “But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally.”
Douthat asked if the deportation policy went too far. “I think it was too tough,” Trump answered. “I think it might be too tough, yeah.”
He painted a picture of who he meant. “When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lotta good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden, they’re being taken outta the country, it’s tough.”
Then came the line that has his base heated. Trump said there’s “a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out.” When asked whether anyone inside his administration holds that view, he said, “there are a lot of those people.”
He described what he sees as the middle ground. “Get the killers out. Get all the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out. But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.”
When Douthat asked whether Democrats would actually be interested in that kind of Trump immigration deal, he said, “I think so, yeah.” He also claimed he could go six months without insulting Democrats if that’s what it took to get a deal done.
What a deal like that would look like is the big question. Trump did not lay out a proposal, name a bill, or announce any change to how deportations are being carried out. What he described sounds a lot like what Washington calls amnesty, which means giving legal status to people who came into the country without permission. That word has been poison on the right for decades, and it is the exact thing his loudest supporters voted against.
The backlash started right away. Steve Cortes, a former adviser to both Trump and JD Vance, posted the clip and warned that if Trump softens on immigration enforcement, “it will be a disaster.”
This is not the first time Trump has floated something like this and caught heat from his own side. In 2019, when he offered Democrats a deal that included temporary protections for Dreamers, the immigrants brought here as children, conservative commentator Ann Coulter fired back, “We voted for Trump and got Jeb!”
The timing makes this one even messier. About an hour after the 60 Minutes interview wrapped, the White House announced that Susie Wiles was out as chief of staff and Stephen Miller was in. Miller is the architect of the mass deportation policy Trump just called too tough. He has also defended the federal agents who shot and killed two Americans earlier this year during immigration operations. Putting the hardest liner in the building in charge of the White House on the same day Trump talked about compromise sends two very different messages.
There may be more going on behind closed doors. The Wall Street Journal reported that Melania Trump blamed the policies after friends of hers were deported, and that Trump admitted Miller had “gone too far.”
The numbers show how big this crackdown has been. The White House says it carried out more than 600,000 deportations over the past two years, and the administration says it revoked legal status for roughly 1.2 million immigrants.
Some Democrats say they are ready to talk. Senators elect James Talarico of Texas and Annie Andrews of South Carolina have both said they want to work with Trump on immigration reform.
Getting any Trump immigration deal through Congress would not be simple. Most major bills need 60 votes in the Senate to get past the filibuster, the rule that lets the minority party block a vote. That means Republicans and Democrats would both have to sign on. The administration has also said it will not accept mass amnesty, so where Trump actually lands could look very different from what he said on camera.
For now, Trump is saying one thing on television while the man who built the deportation machine runs his White House. His base heard “work a deal” loud and clear, and they are letting him know.
