Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, This is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is terrible, of course, but the idea of expelling people considered undesirable is not unprecedented in the American past.  Eric Foner will review that history.  But first: exploiting Trump’s weaknesses — Harold Meyerson will comment, in a minute.
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First up, today’s political update with Harold Meyerson. Of course, he’s Editor-at-Large at The American Prospect. Harold, welcome back.

Harold Meyerson: Always good to be here, Jon.

JW: As we look at Trump’s nominees for his cabinet posts, we’re still thinking about Matt Gaetz dropping out after Trump nominated him as Attorney General. This was a major setback for Trump. It has big implications as the rest of his nominees now come up. He chose to spend some of his post-election political capital on Gaetz. He dared Republican senators to defy him. He threatened that if they did, they would face a challenger in their next primary, financed by Elon Musk. The threats failed — and suddenly Trump looked weaker. His own party was rejecting his first choice for his cabinet.
As a result, I think everybody has been made bolder by the Senate Republicans’ action, including, not to mention, the Senate Republicans themselves.  because it wasn’t that hard. Trump didn’t fight very long to defend his nominee. And now, we have the chance for more opposition to Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence, RFK for Health and Human Services Secretary, Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary. Possibly even a Dr. Oz as his nominee to run Medicare and Medicaid.
It only takes four Republicans to block a nominee, given the current arithmetic in the Senate. There are a fair number of moderate Republicans, Trump closet critics, and retiring senators who could do that. Politico wrote about what they called “the lame-duck caucus” in the Senate–Senators, especially Republicans, who won’t or probably won’t be running for reelection again and therefore they’re immune to Trump’s greatest power, which is having the MAGA base turned against them. The lame-duck caucus includes–or maybe is led by–Mitch McConnell. What do you see as the possibilities here?

HM: Well, McConnell has been constrained by the fact that he has been Republican leader in the Senate. So, he couldn’t get too out-of-sync with the caucus, most of whom were and are intimidated by MAGA voters ousting them in Republican primaries, although he clearly loathes Trump and has almost come close to saying so, if not quite in those terms. But he’s no longer the Republican leader and he’s not going to run for reelection when his term is up in two years. So, I think he would be happy to turn down some of these Trump nominees.

JW: I would think at the top, or close to the top, of Mitch McConnell’s list of people he would like to vote against is RFK Jr.  Mitch McConnell had polio, so he knows about the importance of vaccines. I think he may act on that life experience of his.

HM: That could definitely affect a vote. We know there are at least a couple of moderates for whom voting for some of these appointees would be electorally questionable. Certainly, Susan Collins.  Lisa Murkowski has expressed her dissatisfaction with the new mainstream of the MAGA-ified Republican Party. So even just confining ourselves to those two and McConnell, that gets us to three of the needed four. And there are, as Politico pointed out, a number of Republicans who aren’t planning on running again.

JW: Trump, of course, is aware of this possibility and that’s why he’s been bringing up his hope to nominate his cabinet by recess appointments. Your colleague at The Prospect, Bob Kuttner, reports that there are at least a dozen Republican senators who will refuse to go along with recess appointments. Apparently, Mitch McConnell is at the top of this list. What does it mean if Trump can’t get recess appointments?

HM: First of all, let’s look at why recess appointments are so offensive to so many otherwise spineless Republicans. The answer is simple. Even if they have MAGA beating on their doors on one side, recess appointments erode their own power. That is at least something to which some Republicans attach some principle to–self-interest.  That is a limiting factor on the effect of recess appointments.
Now, it’s also the case that were this taken to the Supreme Court, something very interesting might happen. The court ruled in a case referring to some recess appointments Barack Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board back in 2014, in a case called “Noel Canning,” that some recess appointments are okay, and some are not.
But there was a concurring opinion by Antonin Scalia, which said, “We should dump recess appointments altogether. They’re a vestige of the founders’ reaction to the state of 18th century transportation, when the Senate couldn’t convene for most of the years because it took forever to get there. The only permissible recess is that between the annual sessions of Congress.”
But what was significant about this ruling was not only that Scalia wrote it and then recited it from the bench when the decisions were delivered, but it was signed onto by John Roberts, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, which means they have specifically said such recess appointments, as Trump is talking about, cannot pass constitutional muster. That, I think, unless these guys really want to give double standards a bad name, that I think poses some problems for Trump at the court.

JW: If there aren’t recess appointments, then there will be full hearings on each nominee where there will be a full airing of dirty laundry, embarrassing and terrible things they’ve said in the past.

HM: One can only hope, but one does not expect tough questions to come necessarily from the Republicans. Although, again, in the case of RFK Jr. you could imagine some; and in the case of Tulsi Gabbard as well.  But the Democrats certainly will have at it.

JW: There’s another thing I learned from Robert Kuttner at The Prospect: Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the incoming majority leader, tweeted on Friday, “The filibuster will be safe under Republican control. It encourages compromise and helps ensure that all Americans, not just those whose party is in the majority, have a voice in the legislative process.” So, the Senate Republican leader has pledged to keep the filibuster. How big is that?

HM: It’s pretty big — because the Republicans need 60 votes on any piece of legislation to overcome Democratic blockage, and they ain’t got 60 votes.  They’ve got 53.

JW: I was also surprised by Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, a pro-labor Republican. Now, I didn’t know there was such a thing, but I learned from you that Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who had been a member of Congress from Oregon, but lost her race to a Democrat, Janelle Bynum, Lori Chavez-DeRemer is one of three Republican members of Congress who voted for the Pro Act. Remind us of what the Pro Act was.

HM: The Pro Act was the latest iteration of labor law reform that would greatly increase the penalties when employers violate labor law by what is a common practice firing workers involved in a union organizing campaign. It would require bargaining with a union once the union has won an election or been recognized by the employer. It would significantly, really address all of the myriad erosions of labor law protections that were written into the National Labor Relations Act in 1935, which have gone by the wayside ever since.
It’s been the top priority for unions forever.  They began to try to strengthen the National Labor Relations Act way back in the Great Society in 1965. Couldn’t get it over the Senate filibuster then, or in 1979, or in 1993, or in 2010, or in 2021. Republicans don’t vote for this.
And Ms. Chavez-DeRemer was an obscure one term member of Congress from a suburban rural part of Oregon. Hardly anyone had heard of her, but the Oregon Teamsters had known her record in the Oregon state legislature where she was more or less a pro-union Republican, which she carried over into the House.  And they told Teamster president Sean O’Brien about this. And O’Brien is the only union leader who Donald Trump thinks he owes, since O’Brien gave a primetime relatively pro-Trump speech at the Republican National Convention. So O’Brien asked for that appointment. I think she’ll be swimming upstream, but there she is as a labor secretary designee.

JW: I want to ask you about that swimming upstream. Could it be that Trump’s pick of a pro-labor Republican for Secretary of Labor means something about what his policies toward labor will be in the next four years?

HM: Probably not. It also means that Trump isn’t paying much attention to the ideological and political stance of most of his appointees, other than loyalty to Trump. But what’s been cooking against the National Labor Relations Board, there have been court suits filed by Amazon and SpaceLink, which is to say Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to really take the adjudicating power away from the National Labor Relations Board when it tries to come to some resolution of management-worker disputes. Trump has been sort of encouraged to replace all the Democratic appointees on the National Labor Relations Board, which is not the custom. They usually get fixed five-year terms that are staggered from those of any president. On the one hand, the Republicans have long been gunning for the NLRB, and on the other hand, we have likely Ms. Chavez-DeRemer at the labor department.

JW: Another one of the fascinating, what shall we call it, splits, divides, among Trump’s nominees is what’s happened with his Attorney General pick. The legal strategists at the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation suffered a major defeat at Trump’s hands in the last week when he nominated Pam Bondi as Attorney General. The Nation has a new column by Elie Mystal arguing that Trump’s nomination of Pam Bondi to be his Attorney General has a silver lining — namely, that he passed over much more competent and ideological people when he picked her. She, of course, will be terrible. She will do whatever Trump wants.  But she’s not aligned with the Federalist Society. She isn’t one of the Heritage Foundation people. She didn’t work with Stephen Miller at his America First group of legal Nazis.
Who is she? She got her JD, not from Harvard or Yale, but from Stetson University. She clerked for nobody. Her biggest case, prior to assuming public office in Florida, this is Elie Mystal writing, she was, quote, “The lady who prosecuted former Mets star pitcher Dwight Gooden for violating his probation.”
Pam Bondi will be awful. She is a partisan hack.  But she won’t bring about the kind of structural change that the Federalist Society and the authors of the 2025 Project want. She’ll be on TV a lot, and then she’ll be forgotten. It could have been a lot worse, and this is the best legal outcome anybody could have hoped for right now. That’s Elie Mystal’s argument. What do you think?

HM: This is a case in which Trump values loyalty to Trump over any ideological question. When she was Florida Attorney General, there were all these complaints against Trump University that it was a scam and whatnot, and it was in Florida, but she refused to initiate a case against that. She’s shown up at Trump’s side during his various prosecutions in Manhattan.

JW: I believe Trump made a significant campaign contribution when she was running for Attorney General, after which she made her decision not to prosecute Trump University.

HM: Yeah, she’s a hack. We live in an age when there are things that are a lot worse than hacks — like fascists, for instance.

JW: Another split in Trump’s inner circle that may be possible for us to exploit was his pick of Scott Bessent to serve as treasury secretary. We know that Elon Musk opposed Scott Bessent, calling him “a business-as-usual” choice. He wanted Howard Lutnick, who Musk said would, quote, “actually enact change,” by which Musk means blow things up in government as we know it.
But Bessent is not a bomb thrower. He’s a billionaire hedge fund manager, the protege of billionaire philanthropist, George Soros. He worked for Soros for 24 years. I’ve heard that Soros is Jewish.  And Trump and the MAGA people, of course, throughout the campaign vilified George Soros. Trump fundraising depicted Soros as a puppet master who manipulates national events for malign purposes. This is an age-old anti-Semitic trope.
Bessent is also gay, which the MAGA base may not like very much.
Why did Trump appoint somebody who Elon Musk was against and who was associated with George Soros? Well, Robert Reich wrote that Trump knows only two things about economics, that high interest rates are bad and can lead to you losing office if you are in office when the interest rates go up. And Trump also knows that high stock prices are good, at least for the people who fund your campaigns. So, Trump doesn’t want to do anything that would cause long-term interest rates to go up and doesn’t want to do anything that would cause stock prices to go down. Those are the two things that he’s truly afraid of, and therefore, Robert Reich argues, the stock and bond markets will be a real constraint on Trump. This is clearly evidence that Trump will pick Wall Street over the MAGA base when push comes to shove, just in case you thought he might not. Do you agree with that analysis?

HM: Yeah. Trump’s version of populism, with tariffs and what have you, makes Wall Street very nervous because Wall Street is really the center of the global economy and they do not want that global economy to be disrupted. So, he had to do something to reassure Wall Street. On the one hand, he does that. On the other hand, just as we speak today, on Tuesday, he’s called for 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports. There are many contradictions in the campaign promises and general mindset, if we can call it that, of Donald Trump. But reassuring Wall Street took precedence over pretty much anything else because he, to coin a phrase, follows the money.

JW: One more thing about Bessent as the nominee for Treasury Secretary: we have a report that one of Trump’s attorneys, named Boris Epshteyn, am I pronouncing that right?

HM: I think you are. You got that ‘sh’ right. Yes, Epshteyn.

JW: Okay. Trump attorney Boris Epshteyn told Bessent, before the announcement was made, that he would recommend Bessent to Trump for the post of Treasury Secretary only if Bessent would pay him a monthly retainer of $30,000, or else invest 10 million in a three-on-three basketball league in which Epstein had an interest. Bessent turned down these suggestions, let’s call them. And then what happened?

HM: Epshteyn also, by the way, recommended Matt Gaetz to Trump. Epshteyn has been hanging around Trump a heck of a lot. He has been there for him for a long time. He is currently under indictment in Arizona for setting up a slate of fake Trump electors to overthrow the 2020 election. He has been very close to Trump. Everyone else in Trump-world apparently hates his guts. Even by Trumpian standards, he seems to hit a new level of slimeball-hood.
I was reminded of the case of Rasputin and Tsar Nicholas and his wife the Tsarina, in which everyone in the court desperately wanted to get rid of Rasputin, but the Tsar would not break with him, so they had to knock him off. I think we’re seeing sort of a version of that right now, if not in the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, then at the Trumpian Court at Mar-a-Lago.

JW: One last thing. I think there’s a pattern in the wins and losses of the Senate seats for the Democrats. Just bear with me here. Three white men, all Democratic incumbents lost: Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Jon Tester in Montana, Bob Casey in Pennsylvania. On the other hand, a Latino man won for the Democrats in the swing state of Arizona, Ruben Gallego, and three women won election for the Democrats in states Trump carried — two who are Jewish, Jackie Rosen in Nevada and Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and one who is a lesbian, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. What should we conclude from all this?

HM: Well, that’s certainly the changing face of both the Democratic Party and America.  But I would point out that of the four Senate seats the Democrats lost — because they also lost West Virginia, with Joe Manchin not running again — three of those four states adjoin one another: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio. That shows you, I think, just the depth of Rust Belt despair and anger that the geographic concentration really speaks to about a part of the nation that was largely economically abandoned.

JW: Harold Meyerson — he writes for The American Prospect at prospect.org. Harold, thanks for talking with us today.

HM: Always good to be here, Jon.
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Jon Wiener: Donald Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is terrible, but the idea of expelling people considered undesirable is not unprecedented in the American past. For that history, we turn to Eric Foner. Eric, of course, taught history at Columbia for a long time. His work on Reconstruction and the Civil War won the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Lincoln Prize. My favorite of those books is The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. He’s written for The New York Times, the TLS, the LRB, and The Nation, where he’s a member of the editorial board. We reached him today at home in Manhattan. Eric, welcome back.

Eric Foner: Hello, Jon. Always nice to talk to you.

JW: So why did you write this piece about 19th century America?

EF: Well, that’s how I make my living – writing about 19th century America, or at least used to before I retired. But I have noticed that beginning with the capitol riot back in January after the first Trump election, there was a sort of trope among commentators and others who said, “This is not who we are. This is an aberration. Trump and the violent response to the previous election are separate somehow from the American tradition.” I basically want to show that, how shall I put it: these kinds of things are “who we are,” or at least part of who we are. Not every American tries to violently overthrow an election, and not every American is advocating deporting 10 or 11 million people from the United States, but quite a few are, and indeed, quite a few voted for Trump who made this a cornerstone. This promise to deport millions of undocumented aliens was one of his most important pledges for when he was elected.
My main point is simply that the American tradition has many admirable features – and it has many features which are not very admirable, but are still a legitimate part of our history.

JW: Yeah, Trump says that he will carry out “the largest deportation operation in American history.” There are some surveys from the Pew Research Center and Ipsos that found that a majority of voters, when asked ‘Do you support mass deportation?’ they say ‘Yes.’
But of course, the results of the polls depend on how exactly the question is asked. I’ll return to the evidence about popular support for mass deportation later in this segment.
But looking at the American past in the 20th century, which I know more about than I know about the 19th, there was of course during the Great Depression state and national authorities rounding up and transported thousands of people of Mexican ancestry out of California and the rest of the United States.
And also, in California during World War II on the West Coast, the entire population of Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens were rounded up and transported, not back to Japan because we were at war with Japan, but to internment camps in the interior of the United States.
But we turn to you for the earlier history of mass efforts to move undesirable populations. What are some of the more familiar examples?

EF: Well, possibly the most familiar, especially nowadays that Native American history has become an important subfield, so to speak, of the study of the United States, the Trail of Tears, the Indian removal in the 1830s and 40s. Now, of course, Indians have been pushed off their land from the very beginning of colonial settlement, so this was not perhaps totally surprising; but the concerted national effort and the passage of a law mandating the removal of Native Americans from Eastern land that they owned to be shipped to what is now Oklahoma, what was then called Indian Territory. There is some controversy about how many people were involved, a couple of hundred thousand maybe, a good number died along the way on the Trail of Tears, the forced migration. And it’s today considered one of the most disgraceful moments in American history.

JW: The proposal that affected the most people in the American past was the idea that the slaves should be freed and sent to Africa. This was the idea of something called the American Colonization Society, which is a very early part of American history. Tell us about the American Colonization Society.

EF: Yes. Well, the Colonization Society is a tricky subject to analyze because on the one hand, it’s based on the premise that this should be a white country and Black people are just not Americans and can never really be Americans. That was the position of the Supreme Court eventually in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.
But the other side of the story, you might say, is that colonization was part of a plan to get rid of slavery. It offered Black people a choice: remain slaves forever, or be manumitted or freed–the government will pay your owners–and then you must go to Liberia in Africa or some other place. Liberia was set up on the west coast of Africa by the American Colonization Society.
Now, of course, this did not happen. Slave owners refused the offer of money to liberate their slaves, and most Black people did not want to go to Liberia. They called themselves colored citizens of the United States. They claimed “we are Americans; we have a right to be here.” Most Blacks by then had been born in the United States. They were no longer Africans.

JW: I understand the advocates of colonization included Thomas Jefferson.

EF: Jefferson was obsessed with many things having to do with Black people, one of which was what he called “racial mixing,” which we all know what he was talking about there. He practiced it avidly it seems. Jefferson hated slavery even though he owned slaves. But he said many times, “I tremble for our country when I reflect that God is just.” Some punishment was coming to America for slavery.  He said things like that.
But he also said, “We cannot liberate the slaves and then let them stay here.”  Why not? The “racial mixing” will take place and the purity of the race, of the white race, will be destroyed by this. He also thought that slavery was so oppressive that Black people if freed would launch a war of retribution against white Americans.
So Jefferson came up with some pretty wild schemes to get a whole bunch of ships, bring Black people from the United States to Liberia or other places, then use those ships, load up with white immigrants, bring them back to the United States–a crazy reshuffling of population in the entire world, purely because Jefferson could not imagine the United States as a biracial society of equals.

JW: And there was one other American president who was famously a supporter of colonization.

EF: And that would’ve been honest Abe. Lincoln. I talk about this at some length in my book you mentioned kindly, The Fiery Trial. The statesman Lincoln most admired was Jefferson. The second most admired statesman for Lincoln was Henry Clay of Kentucky. Henry Clay was president of the American Colonization Society. Lincoln said, “This is the only peaceful way we’ll be able to get rid of slavery. We don’t want a race war in this country.” Lincoln didn’t care about – he wasn’t the same as Jefferson in that he was not afraid of racial miscegenation. He didn’t care about that unlike Clay.
Clay has some resemblance to President-elect Trump, even though Trump may not be aware of this, because Clay lambasted free Blacks as criminals, as dangers to white society. That’s why we have to get rid of them,”said Clay, because otherwise they’ll maraud and rob and murder people. That was ridiculous. Black people were no more criminal than anyone else, but Clay insisted they were.
Now, Lincoln never said that either. He didn’t say, ‘We’ve got to colonize the people out of the United States because they’re going to murder us all otherwise.’ No. He said, Why do we need colonization? Because racism is so deeply ingrained in the United States that Black people will never be able to achieve equality, and therefore it’s best for them to be separated, he said, from white Americans.
He pressed for this in the first two years of the Civil War.  But again, it never came about–because Black people were happy to become emancipated, but did not want to simply be expelled from the country.

JW: And then January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which of course didn’t say anything about colonization in Africa. What was his new idea about African Americans?

EF: Yeah, he dropped the idea of colonization right at that moment when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His new idea was simply that Black people are going to become free and part of American society. People don’t remember, he specifically addressed Black people in the Emancipation Proclamation saying they should labor faithfully for adequate wages or fair wages, something Black people have had a lot of trouble getting in our history. But the point is they were supposed to now labor in the United States. He was not talking about shipping them to some other country. Moreover, the proclamation opened the Army to Black enlistment, and Lincoln understood that that was a major step forward for Black citizenship.
Once you go from colonization, which is emancipation plus expulsion, when you go from that to simply freeing four million slaves, then you are changing your whole vision of what American society may be.
So colonization, it never happened. Some Black people moved to Liberia voluntarily, but that’s not the same thing. But it’s an index or a lens through which we can view the kind of complicated and difficult history of race relations in the United States, certainly in the colonial era and the first half or more of the 19th century.

JW: Well, I looked up the state of public opinion in America today about mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Polls that ask simply whether people favor or oppose mass deportation find at least half of Americans say they’re in favor of it. If you ask different questions though, you get different answers. An October poll from Marquette Law School asked voters if they would favor deporting immigrants “even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs, and no criminal record?” To that, only 40% of Americans said they supported deporting those people, 60% opposed.
The Gallup poll asked whether people favored “allowing immigrants living in the United States illegally the chance to become US citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time?” 70% agreed with that.
What about people who were brought to this country as children? The so-called Dreamers? 81% favored a pathway to citizenship for the Dreamers.
CNN, in their final pre-election survey this year, asked registered voters what the government’s top priority should be regarding undocumented immigrants. Two-thirds of registered voters said the government’s top priority should be “developing a plan to allow some to become legal residents.”  So Trump is likely to find a lot of opposition, it seems to me, to mass deportations when he tries to carry them out. 
We record our show in Los Angeles. They say there are one million undocumented immigrants in LA and Orange counties. The LA City Council just a couple of days ago passed the resolution declaring Los Angeles a sanctuary city, resolving that all city agencies will refuse to cooperate with deportations. The LAPD says it won’t cooperate with deportations. The State Attorney General is poised to file lawsuits on the famous day one. And more radical groups like Clue Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice have been organizing plans to protect targeted people. What do you make of all of this?

EF: Well, first of all, as you said before, polls fluctuate wildly sometimes, and particularly depending on exactly what the wording of the question is. I think it’ll be very interesting to see what happens if this conflict between the state and national governments takes place. We have had that in our history. We called it nullification back in the day of South Carolina. Then we had the little unpleasantness of the Civil War along these lines.
What will happen if the mayor of Los Angeles or the governor of California declares that they won’t cooperate with this, and then Trump federalizes the National Guard of California? Can leaders of the National Guard reject a presidential order to do this? I don’t know. I mean, that’s court-martial material.
Relying on the courts, which is not what you said entirely – you had other indications of what might happen – but relying on the courts may be tricky, especially when we’ve got Alito and Thomas and a couple of other fine fellows up there on the Supreme Court. The weapons available to those who want to try to stop mass deportation may be a little weaker than they were four years ago. But we will see. This is what keeps historians in business.

JW: Eric Foner wrote about mass deportation in American history for The Nation. You can read his piece at thenation.com. Eric, thanks for talking with us today.

EF: Thank you, Jon. Nice to be here.