Trump Says His Deportations Were ‘Too Tough.’ An Hour Later, He Made Their Architect Chief of Staff.

Five days after Republicans lost the House, the Senate and red-state offices from Texas to South Carolina, President Trump sat down with 60 Minutes and said something his own base never expected to hear: his deportation push may have gone too far.

“I think it might be too tough, yeah,” Trump told correspondent Ross Douthat in the interview, taped Friday at the White House and aired Sunday night. Then he said a deal with the incoming Democratic majority is “actually doable,” and when Douthat asked if that meant “some kind of legal status for the landscapers,” Trump said yes.

Here’s the part that has everybody scratching their heads. According to CBS, an hour after the interview ended, Trump replaced chief of staff Susie Wiles with Stephen Miller, the man 60 Minutes calls “the architect of the president’s mass deportation policy.”

What Trump actually said

Douthat asked what Trump wants to work on with Democrats. “I’d love to do something on immigration,” he answered. Did the crackdown hurt him in the midterms? “I think it both helped and hurt.”

He gave himself “an A+ for closing up the border” and said that in the last 17 months “zero people came in through our southern border,” compared with “25 million people” under Biden. In the full interview CBS posted, he said 11,888 murderers had been let in and “we’ve gotten most of them out.” He said he gets “very high marks for getting the bad ones out.”

“But I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally,” Trump said. “There’s a large part of the country that think that they should be allowed to stay if they’re good people working in a landscaping company, or working in a hotel, or doing something, right? And in some cases, paying taxes.”

“When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lot of good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden, they’re being taken out of the country, it’s tough. It’s a tough thing,” he said. “But there’s a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out.”

Douthat asked whether any of those people work in his administration, “in the building with us right now.” Trump: “No, no. Well, there are a lot of those people.” Then he laid out the middle ground he seems to favor: “Get the killers out. Get the rapists out. Get all the rough ones out. Get the drug dealers out. But let the people that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years, work a deal for them.”

He also said Democrats are already reaching out. “People have already called me,” Trump said, pointing to Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico, the man he called “Talafreako” on the trail. Could he go six months without insulting Democrats to get a deal? “Very easily.”

The hour that doesn’t add up

Miller pushed ICE to aim for 3,000 arrests a day last year, CBS noted, and the number of people in ICE detention has hit record highs. Putting him in charge of the White House right after floating legal status for long-time workers is “a move that seems to conflict with the president’s professed desire to work with Democrats on immigration,” 60 Minutes said.

So which one is the plan? Trump didn’t say.

The base splits

The word that lit up X was “amnesty,” and Trump never said it. TheBlaze posted that Trump “may work on an amnesty deal with Democrats.” The White House’s Rapid Response account fired back within the hour: “Wrong. The word ‘amnesty’ was never even said in this entire exchange.”

Investor James Fishback, founder of Azoria Capital and a loud immigration hardliner on X, didn’t buy it. He quoted Douthat’s question and Trump’s “Yea” back at the White House account, then went further: “Trump went on 60 Minutes and said he’d cut a deal with the Democrats to grant amnesty to illegals. I was wrong for having even a shred of hope for Stephen Miller as Chief of Staff.” In another post he called Trump “Betrayer in Chief.”

On the other side, Rep. María Elvira Salazar of Miami, who warned in September that many Hispanics who voted for Trump “feel betrayed,” cheered. “Well done, Mr. President! What you described on 60 Minutes is what the Dignity Act is all about,” she posted, pitching her own bill as the vehicle. Fishback’s answer: “The ‘Dignity Act’ is a trojan horse for amnesty.”

The numbers behind the turn

Trump’s read lines up with the exit polls. CBS reports 58% of voters said the administration’s immigration actions have gone too far, and support collapsed in South Texas and other heavily Latino areas that swung to Republicans two years ago. But voters still trusted Republicans over Democrats on immigration, 43% to 41%. In other words, the border is still a winner. It’s the landscaper and the hotel maid that cost votes.

Democrats take over both chambers in January, so any deal runs through Speaker-in-waiting Hakeem Jeffries, who said Sunday his party won’t work with Miller at all. Trump says the phone is already ringing. His new chief of staff built the policy he just called too tough. Somebody in that building is about to lose an argument.