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The Rachel Maddow Show

How Trump's bungling turned his top issue into his greatest liability

The Rachel Maddow Show

Rachel Maddow, MS NOW

Madow, Washington, Congress, Msnbc, Government, Policy, President, News, Versant, Public, Ms Now, Rachel Maddow, Issues, Campaign, Maddow

4.435.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Julia Ainsley, senior Homeland Security correspondent for NBC News and author of the newly released, "Undue Process: The Inside Story of Trump’s Mass Deportation Program" talks with Rachel Maddow about her original reporting into how the Trump administration's series of ad libs on implementing Trump's immigration policy led to a cascade of failures that turned Trump's biggest political boon into a disaster that turned the country against him.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Of all the things that Donald Trump has done or tried to do in his 15 months or so back in office,

0:09.8

if you had to identify the thing he has been most wrong about, I mean, the biggest, at least,

0:17.0

political miscalculation of his second term, the thing he thought was going to be an obvious

0:21.9

winner, and boy, was it not a winner at all. I mean, honestly, there are a million things to

0:28.8

choose from, maybe starting with the war in Iran, right? But thinking about things here at home,

0:35.8

I think you could make a solid argument that the thing he has been most wrong about, the thing he has most miscalculated, is thinking that the American people would really, really love a brutal, bloody, sadistic, even murderous, gratuitously cruel campaign of physical attacks on immigrants.

1:00.2

He thought we would love that. I mean, you can kind of understand why Trump might have thought

1:04.2

Americans would love such a thing. He was elected president twice with some sort of crackdown

1:10.3

on immigrants as a central campaign promise, right?

1:13.4

And particularly when he was campaigning for a second term, he decorated that campaign promise

1:18.1

with lurid, almost pornographically violent fantasies about how immigrants were basically

1:25.9

subhuman monsters and they were responsible for all the bad things.

1:32.6

And so you could see why maybe he thought this was his ticket.

1:36.1

And politically in terms of getting him elected, maybe it was.

1:39.2

But when he got back in power and he actually moved to put this kind of a policy in place.

1:44.8

It turns out the American people did not like this movie.

1:48.4

Not at all.

1:49.8

I mean, Trump's federal agents in masks, grabbing people off the streets, smashing car windows,

1:56.3

dragging terrified parents out of their vehicles while their kids sat in car seats in the backseat watching,

2:02.9

snatching kids off the street and from the bus stop on their way to school.

2:07.6

I mean, not only do the American people, turns out, not like any of this, they have fought back.

2:15.9

The country has seen several of the largest days of protest in its history just in the past year.

...

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