Anyone hoping President Donald Trump would try to cooperate with a new Democratic Congress after last week’s midterm trouncing should adjust their expectations. Despite initially congratulating Democrats and signaling a desire to work with them in the next term of Congress, the White House may be unable to escape political combat.
Since election night, Trump has gestured at compromise in his last two years in office. In an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent and Free Press columnist Ross Douthat that aired Sunday, the president restated the possibility of cooperation with Democrats on immigration legislation. He suggested a more moderate approach to deporting illegal immigrants, and he appeared to criticize the “far right,” who he said “would like everybody taken out”—not only violent criminals.
But when asked if any of those hard-liners happen to work in his own White House, the president demurred. And his silence was telling. On the same day as the interview, he named Stephen Miller—the hard-liner-in-chief—as his next chief of staff. That simple act will make compromise much more difficult, on immigration and any number of issues.
For Democrats, Miller is almost as loathed as Trump himself. Rep. Sarah McBride, the first transgender member of Congress, quipped this weekend, “I think the president wanted someone even more unlikable than him in the cuck chair in the Oval Office.” House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries said on ABC on Sunday that Miller was the architect of Trump’s “violent mass deportation machine, and has unleashed billions of taxpayer dollars to brutalize and kill American citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good,” the two U.S. citizens killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis this January.
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