Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: now that Trump is preparing to round up and deport  undocumented residents, Gustavo Arellano, the LA Times columnist, argues we should thank them for everything they’ve done to make America a better place–starting with his father, who came to the US in the trunk of a Chevy.
But first: How did we get here, with Trump returning to the White House?  Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect will comment on the 93 million people who could have voted – but didn’t – and on Trump’s Day One executive orders. That’s coming up – in a minute.
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How did we get here – with Trump president again; and where are we going, now that he’s back in the White House? For comment, we turn to Harold Meyerson. Of course, he’s editor-at-large of The American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.

JW: Before we talk about some of Trump’s executive orders, I want to talk a little bit about some striking analyses of how we got here that come from Mike Podhorzer, the former political director of the AFL-CIO. He is interested not in the analysis of who voted and what the exit polls tell us about their thinking. He looks instead at the entire universe of eligible voters, especially the 93 million people who could have voted but didn’t. And he argues that neither party really wins elections anymore. There’s only the “not loser.” Americans go back and forth between parties every four years because they’re not happy with their choices, he says.
In 2024, 244 million Americans were eligible to vote. 31.5% voted for Trump, 30.6% voted for Harris, and 38% did not vote. Trump won the same share of the eligible voters that he did four years ago, 32%. But Harris’s share of eligible voters fell by three and a half points compared to Biden four years ago. Harris, we know got seven million fewer votes than Biden had. If Harris had gotten the same vote in 2024 that Biden got in 2020, she would’ve beaten Trump by four million votes. Podhorzer suggests that it’s these results, especially the low turnout, that we need to think about, that they suggest not an embrace of Trump or the growth of MAGA, but rather a vote of no confidence in the Democrats.

HM: I would agree with that. A lot of that is also no confidence in the government, which has been a theme that conservatives have pounded on for years because they prefer the rule of business to the rule of the people. And so that’s the consequence of that. I should also add that Mike Podhorzer’s work is in a tradition going back to the political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, who analyzed way back in the 1960s what he called the hole in the electorate – who wasn’t voting – and noting that the profile of non-voters, at that time at least, significantly overlapped the profile of voters in Europe who voted for Social Democratic parties.

JW: We’ve been told that there was a shift to the right where Democrats abandoned their party and their candidates and switched to Trump. But that seems to be completely wrong.  Podhorzer’s figures show, if we look at how many Biden voters from 2020 switched to Trump in 2024, the answer is 4%. And then he also asked, “How many Trump voters from 2020 switched to Kamala Harris in 2024?” The answer is 4%, the same. So party switching does not explain anything about the outcome.

HM: That’s why we need the work of Mike Podhorzer – because as he points out the real killer for the Democrats was simply the decline in the number of people who went out to vote.

JW: And that was especially acute in the blue cities of the blue states. Los Angeles had a remarkable drop in its Democratic turnout. And of course, Los Angeles County has more Democrats than any place on Earth. And that’s a lot of the explanation of why Harris’s vote total was significantly lower than Biden’s.

HM: Yes, and not only in Los Angeles, but in the biggest cities of the once upon a time blue wall states that Harris lost. In Philadelphia, in Detroit, and in Milwaukee – huge decline in voter participation.

JW: And so we turn to you and we ask the question, why? Why did so many people not vote? Why did so many people who had voted for Biden not vote for Harris this time?

HM: To begin with, as Podhorzer notes, and as Walter Dean Burnham noted, this is pretty much the normal state of American politics, and it’s particularly the case among low-income voters who don’t see anything particularly tangible that government or in this case the Democrats can offer them. And non-voting then becomes sort of a quadrennial habit.
In particular, this I think also relates in the broadest historic view to the fact that, as decades of neoliberal politics have essentially depressed the living conditions of the American working class, you get sort of a general souring on the political process. The Republicans have been pounding on Biden for four years blaming him exclusively for the cost of living. And there’s no question that the cost of living rose throughout particularly the first two years of Biden’s presidency. And that’s something that voters who are normally disenchanted will notice. And so there were more disenchanted voters this time, I suspect, than there were in 2020.

JW: The Democrats have kind of agreed with what you described as the Walter Dean Burnham analysis, that the non-voters should be Democrats and would likely be Democrats if they could be persuaded to vote. So the Democrats focused a lot on making voting easier as the way to get more Democratic votes. In 2020, they were focusing on automatic voter registration, same-day registration, early voting, voting by mail. And Republicans kind of also agreed with this analysis, and they were making it harder to vote – ID requirements at polling places, limits on voting by mail, accusations of voter fraud.
The Democratic reforms actually worked in 2020. The 2020 election, even though there was a pandemic, had the largest increase in voters between two presidential elections on record – 17 million more people voted in 2020 than in 2016, I think largely because of vote by mail. But that has not become a habit for Democrats, even though it’s easier now than ever before to register and to vote, especially voting by mail.
Podhorzer’s view is that the super high Democratic turnout in 2020 was not so much a vote for Joe Biden, who was not a particularly great candidate or an inspiring figure; the super high Democratic turnout of 2020 was against the incumbent Donald Trump. People had seen what he did, they wanted to stop him. And the previous – this is really interesting – the previous high turnout was 2008, Obama. At that point, voters really were excited about the Democratic candidate. They wanted to vote for Obama. So Podhorzer makes a sharp distinction between voting against the incumbent and having a candidate that actually provokes enthusiasm, which Harris turned out not to be.

HM: Yes. And Harris, of course, was weighed down by the fact that of every possible Democratic presidential nominee, she was the one who was inextricably linked to Joe Biden by virtue of being his vice president.
I would also add that the greatest example of people voting because they actually like a nominee and that leading to what I think is the greatest increase in voter participation on a percentage basis – because the country obviously has been a great deal smaller in America’s past – was Franklin Roosevelt’s victory in 1936, which saw a huge increase in voter participation, when for the first time there were working class organizations, newly revitalized unions, mobilizing the kind of workers who had just simply not voted before because they didn’t see anything on offer for them in the political process. And if you look at the fact that Pennsylvania switched from a Republican state even in 1932 to a Democratic state in 1936, that was hundreds of thousands of steelworkers who had really not voted before finally going to the polls and saying Roosevelt is our guy and that the government then could be seen as working for them.

JW: So we’ve taken a look at history, we’ve taken a look at how in 2020 voters were motivated to vote against Trump. Now Trump is back. On his first day in office, he signed dozens of executive orders. Which of these executive orders do you find notable or worthy of examination?

HM: Well, first a broad point, which is that, when most of the voters who voted for Trump were polled, they said the issues that mattered most to them were economic – reducing the cost of living and such. And they didn’t really show much support for Trump’s personal grievance issues. Nonetheless, the executive orders overwhelmingly lean to Trump’s personal grievance issues. And I think the one that will jostle Americans the most is his blanket pardon of the January 6th mob. I think that will alienate any number of people.
It also raises the question, I have to say, of whether Republicans want to be defended by police – because essentially these guys would not have been in jail in the first place had the police not resisted their efforts to storm the Capitol. And even when there was a resolution pending in the House back in 2021 to give gold medals to the Capitol police for saving the members’ lives, there was a number of Republicans who voted against it. And now that Trump has sort of de facto given an executive order that says those who voted against it were right, I mean, you just wonder whether if you’re a self-respecting police officer you actually want to protect Republicans who don’t necessarily believe that they should be protected, I guess.

JW: You emphasize that what motivated Trump supporters, they say, was not just “the economy,” but the cost of living, the cost of groceries, the cost of rent, their own experience of the economy. I noticed he did not have any executive orders lowering the price of eggs or bread, but he did have one about renaming the Gulf of Mexico. Let’s talk about that for a minute.

HM: I was trying to think what would be a historic precedent for renaming a body of water that your nation only controls a small portion of – heads of states don’t usually become the people who name oceans. The Atlantic was named by a sixth century BCE poet in Greece. The Pacific was named by Ferdinand Magellan when he finally escaped the horrendous waves on the Atlantic side of the southern tip of South America and entered the calm waters of the Pacific and it was pacific. But there is a historic antecedent for this, and that was when the Roman Empire named the Mediterranean Sea, I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing this correctly, Mare Nostrum, our sea. But that only lasted as long as the Roman Empire. But then I think of a figure who Trump comes closest to reanimating. When Mussolini became the dictator of Italy in the 1920s, he too said the Mediterranean is now renamed Mare Nostrum. And of course, that only lasted basically until Italy collapsed in World War II and Mussolini found himself dead and hanging over an intersection in one of Italy’s northern cities.
But Trump is in many ways, if you sort of put him through the Mussolini lens, taking over the Panama Canal, well, they can easily be defeated just as Mussolini thought Ethiopia could be. Trump also put out an executive order saying new federal buildings should be in the neoclassical mode with columns like ancient Rome. The Gulf of America is his version of Mare Nostrum. But then when you think about it, for years his main way of doing business is to slap his name on properties he doesn’t actually own. He’s a brander. I suspect around the next bend of the river we will see Mare Trumpus as some significant body of water.

JW: Maybe we should just say a few words about Trump’s belief that he can abolish birthright citizenship, which I believe is part of the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

HM: It is the beginning of the 14th, the first sentence of the 14th amendment to the Constitution Section 1 says that people born in the United States are citizens of the United States. Trump’s abolition of birthright citizenship, I suppose—

JW: Let me just suggest here that we refer to it not as Trump’s abolition of birthright citizenship, but Trump’s declaration that he is abolishing birthright citizenship.

HM: Yes, Trump’s declaration that he can abolish birthright citizenship I suspect is intended to mean that when his goons are deporting undocumented parents, they can deport their US citizen kids along with them. I should add that the Pew, Pew Research Center published a report in 2022 that said there were 4.4 million American citizens who were children of parents at least one of whom was undocumented. So we’re talking about a serious number of Americans who Trump is endeavoring to throw out of the country.
It’s hard to believe the Supreme Court will ignore the plain language of Constitution Amendment 14 Section 1, first sentence. Although there are a couple of members of that court who clearly will do anything Trump wishes. Let us just hope and perhaps bet that that number is smaller than five.

JW: So what should we do now? Our friend, Marc Cooper, has some suggestions. His first suggestion was, “Don’t play ping pong with him by responding with outrage to every incendiary, mythological statement he will daily make. Concentrate on what he is actually trying to do, not what he’s saying.” And most important is “to oppose, disrupt, and block his actual actions,” and “to forge real ties of solidarity and self-defense, first of all for the targeted immigrant communities,” and then to work on building an anti-Trump coalition that can take back the House in 2026 and the White House in 2028.  Sounds pretty good to me.

HM: Well, as usual, Marc Cooper is right. That’s what we should do. Now, of course, the problem with executive orders is they are not only, in this case, sort of the bizarre emanations of Donald Trump’s mind, but they carry the force of law until and unless a court says you’re nuts, you can’t do that. And that is the case with some executive orders, certainly the birthright citizenship one. Sadly, it’s not the case with others. And so, some of these we can ignore and some of these we have to do exactly what Marc Cooper said we should do.

JW: Harold Meyerson – read him at The American Prospect, prospect.org. Thank you, Harold.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Trump has been promising for a long time now to round up and deport millions of undocumented residents. For comment, we turned to Gustavo Arellano. He’s an indispensable columnist for The LA Times, covering, as he says, ‘Southern California everything, and a bunch of the West and beyond.’ Before that, he worked at The OC Weekly, where he was an investigative reporter for 15 years and editor for six. And he wrote a memorable column called ‘Ask a Mexican!’  He’s also co-author of the book, A People’s Guide to Orange County. We talked about it here. Gustavo Arellano, welcome back.

Gustavo Arellano: Hola, Jon.

JW: You were born in the United States in Anaheim. Have I got that right?

GA: Oh, yeah. Anaheim born — and die.

JW: And your father?

GA: He came in the trunk of a Chevy, 1968, crossing the Tijuana-San Ysidro border.

JW: And what is your basic attitude toward the undocumented now that Trump is officially going after them?

GA: Nothing but thanks. My dad got deported multiple times, came back multiple times. I grew up in a place, in an era where a lot of people were undocumented, and it really didn’t matter about their humanity. What mattered was what they were trying to do to better themselves in this country. My dad was able to legalize his status because he married my mom. I always thought it was because of Reagan’s amnesty, but later on they told me ‘no.’ But I knew a lot of people who got their status legalized because of Reagan’s amnesty.
I’m going to be 46 very soon. So I’ve lived through this era so-called ‘illegal invasions,’ whether it was the 1980s, whether it was the Proposition 187 in 1994 in California; Whether it was Trump, whether it was all of these things, whether it was the Deporter in Chief, Barack Obama —  I’ve seen all of these, and what has never changed for me is that undocumented people, they’re literally no different from you and I as American citizens, except we have the citizenship and they don’t. And because of the stupid politics of this country, I don’t know if they ever will.

JW: Let’s start with probably the best-known group of undocumented workers in the United States, the farm workers.

GA: The federal government estimated that over 40% of the people who pick our crops in the United States are most likely undocumented. So almost anything we eat has been touched by undocumented hands. Milk, yeah, that comes from dairy farmers who employ undocumented people up in Wisconsin, up in Michigan, up in Vermont. Crops, we know the breadbasket of the United States is the Central Valley in California. And we know, just earlier this month in January, no, in December, you had raids, ICE raids in Kern County, right at the very southern tip around Bakersfield. And ICE basically said, “Yeah, this is the start. We’re going to do this more in the Central Valley, in Sacramento, in Fresno,” — all of that. And people thankfully stood up and resisted. But if you do not give thanks to undocumented people, the people who pick our crops and make our food – again, then you have no heart.

JW: And undocumented workers pay taxes, I understand.

GA: Some undocumented people are going to use fake Social Security numbers. Well, when they put in their taxes, file their tax returns every year, all that money goes into the Social Security net that basically keeps it alive, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. And not only that; undocumented folks, they’re paying sales tax.

JW: Your column on this said that the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented workers paid about $26 billion into Social Security and $6 billion into Medicare. Do they benefit from those contributions?

GA: Of course not.

JW: The undocumented include tens of thousands of kids, most of whom have come from Central America across the border without their parents. They are called ‘unaccompanied minors,’ and you have a special reason for thanking them.

GA: Yeah, look, you’re younger than a teenager. You’re coming from Central America. You’re going through Mexico. You’re being exploited. God knows what else is happening to you. You’re going by yourself. That’s far more courage than Trump or Vance or Elon Musk or any of his bros have ever exhibited and will ever exhibit.
Look, when it was the 1960s and you had tens of thousands of Cuban children being airlifted out of Cuba into the United States, we welcomed them mostly with open arms. We called it Operation Pedro Pan, for Peter Pan in Spanish. We spent a lot of taxpayer funds, and most Americans had no problem with it, because these kids were Cold War pawns. And I’m not saying they should not have been allowed. By all means, if their parents wanted to send them into this country, God bless them.
Now you have Central America, the Central Americans basically, they’re still suffering from the ravages of the US-sponsored Contras and the US-sponsored dictators that were overthrown during the civil wars of the 70s and 80s, and also the gangs MS-13 that started in the United States, but then proliferated in Central America after we deported them for crimes.
And now you have these unaccompanied minors coming into the United States being separated from their parents. And how could we not want their courage? How could we not want their convictions? How could we not want them in the United States? And yet, no, we’re going to demonize them as invaders. We’re going to demonize them as coming from you-know-what countries, as Trump once so ungraciously put it.

JW: And now we have the Dreamers, the kids brought to this country when they were little, who are now growing up, who are culturally American, now face the prospect of being sent to countries they have no memories of or only the faintest memories.

GA: Yeah. This is, I think, among many heartbreaks when it comes to the issue of undocumented immigrants. This one in particular hits me because I grew up with people who were undocumented, and they were students in high school, but they didn’t have an identity when they were young. Now, a lot of these people are in their early forties. These college activists and high school activists that I met 20 years ago, now they’re adults. Now they have fought, and so many of them are just deflated at all these promises from Obama, from Biden, even from Trump. Trump, that seems to be the only part of the undocumented experience that tugs at his heart. But of course, he’s not going to – I seriously doubt he’ll ever give them citizenship. He’ll probably make them permanent residents or something like that.
It was interesting because they were hailed as the “good ones,” and this was an identity that at one point they embraced. Then they reject it and they said, “No, we’re not superior to any of our parents, to any of our cousins. We are just undocumented like them, and we’re going to push for the same rights that people want to give us to them.” So in that sense, it is the sacrifice that they have made, and, really, this sense of class consciousness, if you will, that is so admirable. And that’s something that us as Americans should really applaud instead of denigrate.

JW: You also have been thinking about the first American from Orange County to be killed in the Iraq war.

GA: Jose Angel Garibay. He came to this country. He was one of those Dreamers. He came here as an infant with his mom, without papers, eventually became a permanent resident, grew up in the Costa Mesa, Newport Beach area. Went to Newport Harbor High, which is a very Republican, very conservative place where Mexican students like himself were looked down upon. But he became part of Newport Harbor life. He enlisted in the Army. He was the first casualty from Orange County. John Wayne Orange County, your first casualty in the Iraq War was a Mexican national who was only granted his citizenship at his funeral – given to his mom. For that alone, I have to thank his sacrifice. And every Memorial Day and every Veteran’s Day, yes, there’s so many veterans out there; there’s so many people who died in combat – but he’s the very first person that I remember. Because again, far too often, the people who give their lives for this country are the poor and the immigrants, and that was Jose Angel Garibay.

JW: Would you like to say anything about the undocumented people who are your friends, your interns, your co-workers?

GA: Well, look, I have to shout out Julio Salgado. He’s an acclaimed artist and illustrator in his own right. He used to be my former radio producer at KPFK when I had a show there, at this point, almost 20 years ago. But he is undocumented. He was able to regulate his, not legalize his status, but at least get papers by applying for DACA. And again, as I said earlier, he and so many other interns who I won’t name here just because I don’t know if they want to be known as undocumented, but Julio’s been very upfront about this. He taught me early on the people who have no status in this country, they tend to be the biggest dreamers, no pun intended, that we have.
The people who rail against illegal immigration, they make out US citizenship to be this sacrosanct thing, like this holy thing that we should never violate. Give me a goddamn break. Some of the worst Americans are American citizens whose families have been here for generations, or whose families have only been here a couple of generations. And they were demonized when they first came over on the boat or across the Rio Grande or on Angel Island.
And now all of a sudden, they’re trashing the newest generation. I guess they’re the most American, right? The most American Americans are the hypocrites, are the ingrates, are the people for whom citizenship is wasted. Because that’s the dark side of the American dream.
But for my former interns, all the Dreamers in DACA, and really almost every single undocumented person I’ve ever known, they represent my America. They represent the America that I want to fight for.

JW: And in your column, you have one final thank you.

GA: Of course, I have to thank my father. I would not be in this country if it wasn’t for him, if it wasn’t for – as an 18-year-old he decided, “You know what? I do not want to be chasing cows through the mountains of Zacatecas anymore,” because that’s what he used to do. “I’m going to come here and I’m going to make something of myself.”
And you know what? He would have been deported if this law that just got passed by the Senate, “Let’s deport all criminals.” He would’ve been deported if that was in effect back then, because he was an alcoholic. He got multiple DUIs. He got sent to jail and prison more often than not.
But this was all before I was born. When I was born, he became sober, around three years later. He’s been sober now, gosh, 42 years. He was him and my mom, mi mami, may she rest in peace – they were able to buy the three-bedroom, two bath, one swimming pool American Dream house. Now all of us four kids of theirs, we all have advanced college degrees. I’m the black sheep of the family as a journalist. The rest of my siblings have good public sector jobs, God bless them.
And also, again, my dad, he had a dream. And he was willing to put himself in the trunk of a Chevy, along with his cousin and a stranger, to get into this country. I know you have Trump and Musk and all these people saying, “Yeah, we need migration. We need immigrants, but we need the smart ones.” If my dad’s one of the dumb ones, give me all the dumb ones in the world. So to my dad, again, gracias for this. Gracias for coming here as an undocumented person, and gracias for the sacrifices that you’ve always made for us.

JW: Gustavo Arellano – read his column at The LA Times. Gustavo, special thanks for this one.

GA: Gracias, as always, Jon.