Trump Becomes the Very Thing He Swore to Destroy. And It Might Cost Us Our Country.

The Tucker Carlson Show

This episode of The Tucker Carlson Show examines the perceived betrayal by Donald Trump on his core campaign promise to secure the U.S. border and deport undocumented immigrants, despite having

Key takeaways

• Trump's 2016 campaign promise to deport all illegal immigrants has not been fulfilled despite being central to his political movement.
• Former Border Patrol leadership reports systemic sabotage of border enforcement efforts under the current administration.

Main topics

• Trump's immigration promises vs. current enforcement policies
• Former Border Patrol leadership testimony on systemic betrayal

Notable quotes

"The fundamental problem with the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists, and powerful politicians. It does not serve you, the American people."

Conclusion

The episode concludes with a call for renewed civic courage and national awakening, urging young

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:04) The Speaker 6 (0:05) city moves fast, but your vibe, that's different. Sharper, smoother, more alive. Speaker 7 (0:15) The new Speaker 6 (0:20) Honda City isn't just made to drive, it's made to feel. The new Honda City, all new vibe. Speaker 5 (0:28) It's an interesting and revealing experience to talk to Trump voters right now. They're having a lot of conflicting thoughts. Now, most people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 did so not because they were more popular with their neighbors, but because they felt that Donald Trump was the last chance this country had to make fundamental changes it needed to make to avert obvious disasters looming on the horizon. And so because people who voted for Trump did so against the considered advice of every news organization in the United States, basically, and all educated, fashionable people. They kind of went out on a limb to vote for this guy. There is a natural hesitance to concede that things aren't working as planned. So if you talk to them, they will almost all concede, almost all concede that a regime change war with Iran was kind of not part of the plan. Very few people voted for Trump, hoping that, you know, the Iran nuclear program that didn't actually exist in any meaningful way would be the. central focus of the administration, like that nobody thought that who voted for Trump two years ago. And some of them will tell you, no, it's actually very important that we ended that or continue to fight Iran for whatever reason. Those are the Fox News viewers are almost all over 70. But for most Trump voters, it's an obvious betrayal. Like, obviously, of course, we didn't want that. Of course, you promised you wouldn't do it. You did it. So they'll tell you that. But that's not the same as regretting their vote for Trump. Because most people who voted for Trump, who I should say are some of the best people in the country, whatever you think of Trump, it's sort of this weird situation where the best people in the country elected one of the worst people in the country. Or another way to put it, the people who care most about the United States, who are the most vested in the system, who believe most fervently in, say, the Constitution. Speaker 5 (2:25) somehow elected a guy who doesn't care at all about any of that. So how did that happen? Well, only historians probably will unravel that mystery. But in the meantime, most people who voted for Trump that we've talked to anyway, are not at the point where they're rejecting Trump. They don't want to reject Trump. They vested so much in the guy that it's too hard to concede that, wow, that was a mistake. And of course, most of them wouldn't vote for Kamala Harris under any circumstances. So it's not like they had someone else to vote for. But if you press them a little bit, they say, look, yeah, of course, this is not going as planned at all. And they'll tell you what a lot of them said in his first term from 2016 to 2020. They'll say, you know, he's a good guy, but he's surrounded somehow by bad people who don't share the same vision, who are not America first, who are in it for themselves or in it for a foreign country or whatever. They've sold Trump out. But Trump either can't get a handle on the federal bureaucracy or he just doesn't know. He doesn't know that they're doing this. You know, if only Trump knew. Speaker 5 (3:27) And then if you press them still more, they will say, yeah, well, look, it's not great in a lot of ways, but immigration. He sealed the border. He kept his promises on immigration. And that's not a small thing because Trump's position on immigration is the core of the Trump movement and has been since 2015 when he first emerged as a candidate. Not a credible candidate. He was still kind of a joke to a lot of people in Washington, New York, and L.A. But he soon became a force in the Republican Party and then pretty swiftly took over the Republican Party because of his position on immigration, really for two reasons. One, it was a lot more popular than anyone in New York, Los Angeles or Washington had any idea, just didn't know that there was a whole world out there that disagreed with him vehemently on the question of immigration and not just illegal immigration, but immigration broadly. Like who should live here? Do we have too many people here? Too few people here? Most people feel there are too many already. It's becoming a crowded country, and most Americans are not for that. Why would they be for that? And they felt this way even 10 years ago. And so Trump's position on that is the thing, the single thing that vaulted him from failed casino magnate to presidential nominee. It was immigration and his willingness, and this is the second part of the equation, to basically give the finger not simply to the establishment, but to the Republican establishment. Trump was never an orthodox Republican. That's not a knock against him. That's the whole reason that so many Republican voters supported him, because they were dissatisfied with their own party. They'd voted for these guys since Reagan, at least since 1980. And what had they gotten? Not a better country, but a weaker, poorer country. Their party had betrayed them, and they knew that, whether they admitted it in public or not. So Trump's willingness to break with the Republican Party on the question of immigration, which was a core Republican orthodoxy, it was Ronald Reagan, of course, who signed the amnesty of 1986, totally changing the composition of the state of California, his state, and others. And so from 1986 to 2016, that was the Republican position. Yeah, we have problems with illegal immigration, but immigration is great. It's the basis of our country. It's engraved on the bottom of the Statue of Liberty. Give us your tired and poor and people yearning to be free, etc. That's the guy who does my lawn. Only Trump could change that. Or more to the point, only Trump did change that. And so in case you've forgotten, here is the last 10 years encapsulated in four or five soundbites of Donald Trump on immigration. And the first clip you're about to see is exactly 10 years old. It was August 31st, 2016, exactly 10 years ago. Here's Donald Trump. Speaker 3 (6:33) The fundamental problem. With the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors Political activists and powerful powerful politicians. It's all you can do. Let me tell you Who it does not serve. It does not serve you the American people doesn't serve you under my administration Anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country and back to the country from which they came. Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws. and to have a country. Otherwise, we don't have a country. Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone. And you can call it deported if you want. The press doesn't like that term. You can call it whatever the hell you want. They're gone. Speaker 5 (7:55) You know, it's worth lingering over those words. And you wonder who wrote that. Sounds like a Stephen Miller speech. Much hate towards Stephen Miller, the old Stephen Miller, for writing things like that. We're just guessing. But let's just consider these words. The fundamental problem with the immigration system in our country is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, political activists, and powerful politicians. Let me tell you who it does not serve. It does not serve the American people. It doesn't serve you. So how is that not true? Everything about that paragraph is true. The immigration system was not designed to benefit the public. And if it was, tell me how it's worked. There's no net economic benefit to the way the United States has done immigration over the last 25 years. And if there is, what was it? How could a country that transitions from manufacturing to a knowledge economy and now to high tech to an economy that doesn't even really need labor, that's the promise of AI, how does it need 100 million new low-skilled workers who don't speak English? Tell me what need that serves. Tell me how the United States benefits from that. Ordinary people, of course, there's no sense in which the public benefits from that. And you know that that's true because the people who... designed that system and have defended that system haven't actually defended it. They've merely attacked anyone who questions that system. You're a racist. You just don't like them because they're not white. Meanwhile, often in the same speech, they will say immigration is turning America non-white. And that's great. And anyone who notices that is a believer in the great replacement conspiracy theory, which is anti-Semitic. Speaker 5 (9:39) It's not an argument in favor of immigration. It's a control tactic designed to crush opposition to a program that on its face hurts the majority of the country and is certainly being enacted against the will of the majority of the country. And so way back 10 years ago in August of 2016, Trump said that out loud. And that may be more than anything, perhaps his opposition to the Iraq war retroactively. But let's just say probably more than anything, his critique of the American immigration system and particularly his point, his true impossible to refute point that it serves only the people who designed it and not the public. That's why they opposed him. Speaker 5 (10:28) And that itself is revealing because, in fact, Trump is making a kind of traditionally left wing critique, a pro-labor critique. In fact, he's making a species of exactly the same argument that organized labor made throughout the teens and 20s. And that's why after the First World War in about 1924, at the behest of the labor unions, the United States essentially shut down immigration into the country to keep the labor market tight, to keep wages up. For the working and middle class. And that's one of the main reasons that this country from then until 2015 under Barack Obama had a majority in the middle class. That is no longer true. And the primary reason it's no longer true is because labor markets were watered down by more people. It's a supply and demand question. More willing workers, lower wages. And then the secondary effect, which is. the total destruction of the native workforce. People born in this country, raised with a certain expectation of standard of living, drop out of the workforce entirely. They give up. And that has happened and it's measurable. In fact, it's one of the defining facts the moment we're living in, though it's almost never noted. People born in this country, people who had conceivably relatives who fought in the Civil War. are dropping out of the workforce in record numbers. That's one of the reasons we still have a tight labor market. It's one of the reasons it's hard to find help, because people born here are not working. And they're certainly not working at the lower end of the scale. Speaker 5 (12:04) So everything about Trump's critique was not just right, it was spot on. And he wrote that critique to victory in 2016, along with a couple of very specific promises. And you heard a couple of them right there, and we'll add another. That is build a wall. The 2016 campaign could be boiled down to one slogan, build a wall. Well, of course, Trump didn't build a wall, didn't even make really a good faith effort to build a wall. And his supporters and defenders mostly ignored that, me included, because most of them felt he probably wanted to. It's just hard. And he got distracted and there was Russiagate. Speaker 5 (12:48) Most people who voted for Trump all three times, and even the last time, believed. In fact, I've never met anyone who voted for Trump who didn't believe that he really did understand that mass migration is terrible for the United States as it has been terrible for Europe, as it was terrible for Central Asia under the Mongols. It's always terrible. It's too much change, too fast. And it destroys the pre-existing culture every single time. So we know that. It's not racism. That's nature. Speaker 5 (13:23) And Trump knew that and he said it. And most people, people who hated him and loved him, thought he meant it as he said it. Why did they think that? Because he kept saying it. This is one feature of Trump's program that remained consistent from 2015 all the way up until election night 2024. Here is Trump that year, that campaign, on stage with Kamala Harris in the now famous moment. where he accused the Haitians of the Midwest of eating the dogs and cats. Watch. Speaker 3 (13:56) What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk. It's not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats. They're eating. They're eating the pets of the people that live there. Speaker 5 (14:25) Really one of the great moments in political history. And of course, it worked on a couple of different levels. On a political level, this is what the kids call trolling. Trump says something knowing it will provoke outrage, blind outrage, in fact, blind rage, and that every liberal on social media will be spouting, just fuming, sputtering, spitting, huffing. And that that anger will provoke them, his opponents, to take positions that are totally out of line with where the rest of the public is. In other words, by making them mad, he makes them more extreme. And that extremism sinks their ship in the end. It's smart. It may be corrosive. It may be damaging long term. But as a political tactic, that works. And no one did it better. No one does it better to this day than Donald Trump. So on that level, it was a success. But on a deeper level, it worked because there's a lot of truth in that. Were the Haitians eating the dogs and cats in Springfield? I don't know. They certainly could have been. Has mass migration, third world mass migration, made small towns in America better? Only people who've never been to those towns could claim it has. Anyone who's actually been to those towns or lives in one, who's gotten in a car and driven through lightly populated parts of the country in the last 15 years, what does it look like? It looks awful. It's dying. And the solution in state after state and town after town, city after city, beginning with Chicago, long our second biggest city, now our third, but in all kinds of cities has been, the tax base is gone. We've got a lot of empty apartments. We're going to fill them up. With immigrants. And they've done that. And the effect has been devastating to the country. It's not an attack on those immigrants. Most of them are looking for a better life. Whether or not they care about the United States. In many cases, they don't. Many of them don't even seek citizenship. They don't care. They're here to make money for their families back home. That doesn't make them evil. Most of them aren't evil. Some of them are criminals. But most of them aren't. In fact, a lot of them are very hard workers. So it's not an attack on them to say that it has been utterly devastating to the communities in which they've moved or been moved because everything changes instantly. And what does that mean for the people who live in those communities, who grew up there, who had no role at all in this policy, who wouldn't sign off on it if they'd had the chance, but of course were never given the chance. They weren't even asked. It happened to them. People who live far away, who have more power than they do, impose this on them for reasons that have nothing to do with their well-being or thriving. It was a kind of punishment imposed from afar. That's how they experience it because that's what it is. And they're resentful about that. That doesn't make them racist. Most of them aren't racist. Whatever that means. By the way, the people throwing around the term racist never define it. But they're not bad people. They're not evil. They don't hate others because of their skin color. They just don't want their neighborhood to change overnight and become a foreign experience. Who would want that? And by the way, the people making these decisions never impose these decisions on their own neighborhoods. And if you don't believe it, drive through their neighborhoods. Look up the 15 richest zip codes in the United States. And they're also the most stable zip codes because they are not subjected to mass migration. So that kind of tells you the whole story right there. Martha's Vineyard looks a lot like it did 50 years ago. So does Nantucket. So does Brookline, Massachusetts. So does Aspen. If it's so great, then why don't they have 10,000 Haitians living in Martha's Vineyard? Because it's not great. That's why. It's not an attack on the Haitians. It's the nature of mass migration, taking people from a completely different culture with no education, limited skills and no money and dropping them into what was formerly a pretty prosperous, stable community. Who benefits? Not the formerly prosperous community. If you think that's racist, then go away because that's absurd. It's not. It's real. And Trump made that point. He was brave enough to do that. And God bless him for doing it. So because he said that and many things like that, normal people who don't just dismiss all challenges to their worldview as racism or anti-Semitism, but try to critically assess what others are saying. Those people said to themselves, you know, he's on to something here. Like, what are we doing to Springfield, Ohio? Why aren't we doing that to Bethesda, Maryland? Well, we're not doing it to Bethesda, Maryland, because Bethesda, Maryland is rich and members of Congress live there. That's why. In Springfield, Ohio, where is that? Who cares? That's like post-industrial hell. We can do whatever we want to them. And if we want to construct artificially a new voting base in the middle of Ohio, if we want to change it from red to blue or whatever our plan is, we just want to weaken America and divide it so it can't oppose us collectively, which may be part of the plan. But whatever our aim is, we can do it in Springfield, Ohio, because who's going to stop us? They don't have a lobby in D.C. Mary Maddison doesn't care what happens in Springfield, Ohio. So that's what happened. And everybody knows that. And let's stop lying about it. And Trump was one of the only people not to lie about it. And of course, he expressed it in artfully kind of retarded way, but it doesn't make it less true. So it was on the basis of that and his opposition to foreign wars that got him elected in 2024. So what happened then? Speaker 5 (20:10) Well, a lot happened then. On the other hand, not much happened then. As you're about to learn as we talk to the recently departed head of Border Patrol, Greg Bovino, who spent 30 years in the Border Patrol and was hired early on to get our immigration system under control. One of the things that happened is that there was turnover in who ran. our immigration system. Now, it's mostly run from Washington, of course, and ICE and the Border Patrol are the two main instruments. Take a look at the new head of the entire immigration enforcement operation. This is a former senator. from Oklahoma called Mark Wayne Mullen, and he's taken over in the last year. This is the guy Trump hired to deport over 100 million illegals. Watch this. Speaker 1 (21:13) We have naturalization ceremonies every single day in the United States that we're in, that is, you know, federal government's open. We have hundreds of thousands of people. In fact, we're real close to 900,000 individuals that have been naturalized in the last 12 months. There's a legal system to go through. Speaker 5 (21:36) Wait a second. This is the guy who runs Department of Homeland Security, Mark Wayne Mullen, who was hired by Trump to deport all these illegals who came into the country over the last 20 years, but particularly over the four years under Joe Biden. 50 million, they told us. And here he is this month. That was August 4th of this month, sitting before the National Governors Association, bragging about how many of these people have become citizens. Almost a million, 900,000. What? Was that the promise? Did Trump run less than two years ago on the promise to give citizenship to people who came here illegally? Wasn't it the opposite of that? And if it was the opposite of that, why did he hire one of the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, one of the most pro-illegal immigration Republicans in the entire Senate, and that's saying a lot, Mark Wayne Mullen, to run deportation? This is starting to feel like a betrayal. Oh, but it gets worse. Here's what Mark Wayne Mullen went on to say to the governors on August 4th of this year. Speaker 1 (22:43) What I'm saying is, let me work with you on this stuff. I'm not handling things like maybe the past secretary had. I'm just saying let's work to get the worst of the worst off the streets, and then you won't see me in your cities and states like you do as much because my presence won't be as big. In fact, you probably won't even see us at all. Speaker 5 (23:05) Oh, we're going to stop enforcing immigration law. We're going to go after the worst of the worst, the criminals. Speaker 5 (23:13) by the way, presumably could be rounded up by local or state law enforcement. Isn't that their job? This is the head of federal immigration enforcement. The guy whose job was literally paid to enforce immigration law, laws that were passed by the Congress. These aren't regulations that came out of the agencies. These are laws passed by the democratic process. In other words, you vote for someone so he can make a law that reflects your views and your values. That's what democracy is. And he does. And then this guy is hired to make sure those laws are enforced. And here he is telling the 50 governors that actually I'm not going to enforce those laws. Now, if he worked for Joe Biden, this would be a scandal would be on every Fox News show all day long. Here's the head of the Department of Homeland Security saying he's not going to enforce immigration law. Oh, my gosh, they're open borders people, which they were. This is Trump's guy, Mark Wayne Mullen, making the same claim. And so the point is really simple. The true betrayal of the second Trump term may not be foreign policy. Speaker 5 (24:23) That's the most damaging thing Trump or any American president has ever done, beginning a fruitless war with Iran and thereby destroying our empire and probably our dollar. But in terms of a political betrayal. What Trump has not done in immigration is more profound because you probably won't find a single Trump voter who disagreed with Trump's views on immigration. And once again, this is why Trump was able to move from the private sector as a branding guy to the White House as an American president was on the basis of his promises on immigration. So for him to betray those promises is profound. And it's understandable that most people voted for him. can't metabolize this, don't want to deal with it, want to believe we've sealed the border and everything's fine. But at a certain point, it's important to know exactly where we are, not just speculate about it or cite some study from Yale on what's the state of illegal immigration in the United States, but talk to the guy who ran it, Greg Bovino, who ran Border Patrol, who has the actual numbers on this question. How many illegal aliens are in the United States? These are people who are foreign nationals who are living here illegally, who have broken the law. To get here in a breaking the law in every single case, every single day, by using fake documents to work and collect benefits and send their kids to public school and to use the emergency room at public expense, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And these are not minor laws. These are core laws that if you broke, you would be punished for breaking. So how many of those are there? How many were in this country the day Trump was inaugurated, January 20th, 2025? And how many are here now? What are the real numbers? No one has pointed this out. Democrats have no incentive to point it out, of course. ICE shot a couple protesters last year. And so the emphasis has been on that. They're murderous thugs. OK, we can debate that. Obviously, shooting unarmed people is bad. Never defend it. Speaker 5 (26:34) But that's not the whole story. The whole story is that immigration enforcement in the United States has stopped, has stopped. Speaker 5 (26:45) And this fact, which is a central fact, which will define what our country is like going forward, or even if it exists as a coherent country, is being completely ignored. Homeownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a