President Donald Trump's increasingly off-the-wall rants as he's confronted with polls about cratering public support for his Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations are a sign he realizes he's trapped and has no easy way out, immigration advocate Lia Parada told The New Republic's Greg Sargent in a far-reaching interview published on Monday.
The increasingly brutal crackdowns in blue cities, which resulted in two deaths at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis, have sparked protests around the country and even a top-charting Bruce Springsteen song.
Sargent and Parada first discussed part of Trump's verbal manifesto to reporters over the weekend. "The people want law and order," said Trump. "And we have a silent majority. You know, we have a silent majority of people. They don’t go and riot and everything else, but they like what we’re doing. They like having a safe city. I get calls every single day. Every person I see working in the White House, people I don’t know — many people work here — and they say, ‘I’d like to thank you, sir, you’ve made Washington so great. We walk to work.’ They walk to work. Every person in his building. I mean, virtually every time I see somebody, they thank me because a year and a half ago they lived in hell and now they can walk to work and they’re totally safe. Nothing’s going to happen."
In Parada's view, "we’re really grasping at straws here for public opinion when you’re citing the support of your court — of the 'King’s Court' — to say that he’s on the right side of this."
Sargent and Parada also addressed Trump's bizarre tangent into claiming the demonstrators' protest signs are too well-made for this to be an organic movement.
"You look at the signs, the signs are all professionally made," he said. "They have signs that are gorgeous. In fact, I want to get the sign because I’m the big … I need a lot of signs for different things and I want to find out whoever does their signs, they do a beautiful job. You know, everybody has this beautiful sign with brand new wood. It’s like leather handles… they have a leather handle on the bottom."
"I think it’s hilarious that he’s caught up on the 'quality' of poster signs as his response to the very real, organic, grassroots opposition to what’s happening in Minneapolis and across the country," said Parada. "I myself have seen that most of the public opposition is not organized by advocacy groups. It is everyday people who are coming out and speaking out against what’s happening."
In fact, she added, this kind of response is "so different from the first Trump administration, partly because many of the organizations are on the ground helping day-to-day people and are being targeted by the administration. And so it’s created a whole new world of champions for immigrants in their communities. And it’s been really amazing to see. And so all he has is to talk about the posters."