The MAGA immigration malaise
The Playbook Podcast
POLITICO
3.9 • 699 Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | Today on the Playbook podcast, Maga World is raging over the latest White House pivot on immigration. |
| 0:11.7 | We got the latest on that and what Tom Homan did next after the departure of Christy Knaum from DHS. |
| 0:18.4 | And how about this? |
| 0:19.2 | An $11 billion excursion. Is Donald Trump really winning this war? |
| 0:24.5 | Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard. And I'm Megan Messerly. It's Thursday, March 12th. |
| 0:30.1 | How you doing, Megan? Great to see you. I'm great, except for this weather today. It's supposed to start out warm and then get freezing in the middle of the day. I'm so confused by what's happening. It's a brutal time of year to be in DC. It is. You have to take all different costumes to you wherever you go. How much time did you spend last night watching Donald Trump doing his various events and speeches and things? All of it. My full night. This is, Jackie, you should know by now. This is all I spend my time doing. |
| 0:55.6 | A good way that listeners should spend their time this morning is having a look at a couple of really good stories on the Politico website that we've broken this morning. |
| 1:01.5 | One that I want to start talking about particular is by Sam Benson, one of our national politics reporters, and it's on immigration. |
| 1:08.0 | Sam has got a story about a group that calls itself the mass deportation |
| 1:12.5 | coalition. And this is a group of Trump allies, of anti-immigration groups, various hawkish experts |
| 1:17.9 | who have sort of banded together because essentially, Megan, they think the White House is |
| 1:23.0 | kind of backing down or chickening out or not really going to town on immigration on the way that |
| 1:29.6 | they feel Donald Trump promised he was going to before the election and sort of had made |
| 1:33.6 | noises he would. |
| 1:34.8 | And they sort of aspire change of strategy since what happened in Minnesota. |
| 1:38.8 | And they're trying to put more pressure on the White House and the president to go really |
| 1:42.9 | hardline on immigration. There are plenty of people on the right in Mag the president to go really hard line on immigration. |
| 1:44.4 | There are plenty of people on the right in Maga World and beyond Maga on the right who think |
| 1:50.2 | Donald Trump is not going nearly far enough. Absolutely. I mean, I hear this a lot from folks |
| 1:55.9 | in Maga World, this concern that President Trump ran on this promise of mass deportations, and some folks |
| 2:05.6 | feel like they were sort of sold a bill of goods and that that is not what the Trump administration |
| 2:11.1 | has been doing. Obviously, to your point, a lot of folks believe that the president has gone too far |
... |
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