Hello and welcome to the Donald J. Trump School of Politics and Public Policy! As you may know, we are the only graduate school accredited to teach the Trump Method (TM™). Though we offer advanced courses in applying the Method to trade and NATO , we do that only to justify your huge federal student loans and to keep things interesting for us professors. When it comes to domestic politics, there is only one Trump Method, ten steps to winning and governing, and you will learn them all here in Trump 101: Illegal Immigration. (We like to call it “How Dense Are Democrats, Really?” or “Trump for Demmies”.) It takes five minutes. Here we go:
Step 1: Identify a real problem.
Step 2: Hyperbolise the problem. It is not enough to spotlight a surge of illegal migration. Claim thousands of murderers and rapists are on the loose, foreign dungeons and insane asylums are spewing their contents across the border, dogs and cats are broiling together. Claim millions more migrants have crossed than the government has counted. How can anyone prove you wrong?
Step 3: Promise extreme measures. But do not be specific! For example, you might threaten the “largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America”, but do not say what you mean by “criminals”. Say you will deploy the military but do not say how.
Step 4: Count on Steps 2 and 3 to derange your opponents, including the left-leaning press. If you are for something, they will be against it—and they will be against it to the same degree you are for it. This is why your oratory must be extreme. Always bear in mind the key insight of Mr Trump’s mentor, the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn: “I bring out the worst in my enemies, and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” Mr Trump’s opponents forgot or ignored that the previous “largest deportation program of criminals” was carried out by President Barack Obama; that every president since Bill Clinton deployed the military to the border; that not long ago the pro-labour left resisted even legal immigration (as Senator Bernie Sanders put it in 2007, “The last thing we need” is to admit “millions of people into this country who are prepared to lower wages for American workers”) while the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal wanted open borders.
This nursery-school dialectic accounts for Mr Trump’s greatest triumph with the Method: President Biden’s shocking neglect of illegal immigration until, politically, it was too late. Images of chaos at the border from his first two years in office let Mr Trump do what he couldn’t in 2020—run his 2016 campaign again. Sure, as the press did with Mr Trump, it will trumpet your strongest statements and publish “fact”-checks insisting migrants do not cause crime or lower wages. This will help you. If they are trying to explain the problem away, you are winning, because you got Step 1 right—the problem is real—and Americans know it.
Step 5: Scatter breadcrumbs. Hint that you favour more legal immigration; that as you crack down, you will “have the heart”, as Mr Trump put it. The press will downplay this talk, since it complicates the storyline, but centrists will be reassured, and such signals will preserve an asset Mr Trump prized: wriggle room.
Step 6: This is the fun part. Shortly after you win, claim you have solved much of the problem. Step 2 makes this easy, because the problem was never as bad as you said. A classic demonstration came on December 8th, 2024, when Mr Trump appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and, in his application of TM™, achieved a two-fer: claiming simultaneous success for his tariff and immigration policies without having done anything but make a bit more noise. “Within ten minutes after that phone call,” he said of tariff threats against Canada and Mexico, “we noticed that the people coming across the border, the southern border having to do with Mexico there, was at a trickle. Just a trickle.” One phone call! Ten minutes! A trickle! (Of course—“fact”-check— measures Mexico and Mr Biden finally put in place had reduced illegal crossings below the level during the last months of Mr Trump’s first term.)
Step 7: Set common-sense priorities. As Mr Obama did, focused first on deporting migrants who commit crimes, then on those who arrived most recently. Avoid dividing families or deporting the staff of farmers or Silicon Valley plutocrats.
Border bazaar
Step 8: Cherish your allies, and your opponents. Astute Democrats played ball. Cynics argue Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, panted to meet with the “border tsar”, Tom Homan, because Mr Adams was angling for a pardon. But he was also struggling with a migrant crisis in a city that was turning Trumpier under his feet. In California, Governor Gavin Newsom, his eye on running for president, asserted right away the complexity that Democrats had struggled to acknowledge, that illegal immigration was a nuanced issue, “not black and white”: state law did not bar co-operation in deporting possible threats to public safety. By contrast, Mayor Brandon Johnson of troubled Chicago was a blessing in another way. Picking fights with him persuaded Mr Trump’s base voters that the mayor was being more aggressive than he actually was.
Step 9: Control your zealots. This is a hazard created by Steps 2 and 3, and Mr Trump struggled with it, along with his own instinct to divide Americans. The most scandalous treatment of migrants resulted from aides taking him literally. Even poor J.D. Vance, with his yen for building intellectual castles atop Mr Trump’s ever-shifting politics, had to revise his claims about immigration being responsible for everything that was wrong with America, because winning the popular vote gave Mr Trump a taste of what it might be like to win the approval of most Americans. That’s what finally drew him, in 2026, to:
Step 10: Pursue bipartisan immigration reform.
Subscribers to The Economist can sign up to our new Opinion newsletter, which brings together the best of our leaders, columns, guest essays and reader correspondence.
