The Trump administration got a tongue-lashing on MS NOW's "Deadline: White House" Thursday, following Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's boast that low job numbers are okay because immigrants are being deported to balance it out.
Not only is this not how the economy works, noted anchor Alicia Menendez to former GOP strategist Tim Miller, but it also reveals a glaring contradiction at the heart of MAGA ideology.
"I just want to make sure I follow the logic here, which is they told us that the immigrants they were deporting were the worst of the worst, who apparently had, like, great American jobs on the side of their criminality," said Menendez. "And they can't seem to decide which one it is," she added. These two things can't be true at once, she said. "They can't get their own messaging."
Miller agreed.
"It kind of goes back," he said, arguing that there was a similar contradiction underpinning Trump's tariff war, when he said parents could buy fewer dolls for their kids if tariffs make prices go up.
"I thought this was supposed to be the golden age where we were going to have this great economic boom in the country, we were going to bring manufacturing back to the country, we're going to have, you know, kind of a land of plenty," said Miller. But now Trump's policies are actually in place, he said, their message has changed to "we don't need to create that many jobs actually, because we've deported so many people."
Their only other messages, said Miller, are "maybe tighten your belt at Christmas this year" and "if you have to pay a little bit more at the gas pump, you know, four bucks a gallon, it's worth it because we changed one Ayatollah with another Ayatollah. You know, they don't have a lot to work with. And the messaging is pretty bad on top of that."
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