Trump refuses to take 60 Minutes bait

“Have some of these raids gone too far?” Norah O’Donnell asked Donald Trump of ICE immigration arrests as he sat down with 60 Minutes for the first time in five years.

Trump refused to take the bait. Instead of ranting or insulting O’Donnell, as she may have hoped, he was calm – and even counterintuitive.

“We have to start off with a policy, and the policy has to be, you came into the country illegally, you’re going to go out,” he said. “We’re going to work with you,” he continued, “and you’re going to come back into our country legally.”

Pressed on whether he plans to use the military to crack down on anti-ICE protests, Trump declined. “I could,” he said, “but I haven’t chosen to use it. I hope you give me credit for that.”

On tariffs, a line of concern across the aisle, Trump simply pointed to the stock market. “Look, because of tariffs, we have the highest stock market we’ve ever had,” he said.

O’Donnell parried. “When the stock market is doing well, that doesn’t affect everybody,” she said, as Trump shot back that record high 401(k)s do indeed impact the average Joe.

The CBS News show contextualized the government shutdown under the specter of needy Americans losing their SNAP benefits as Republicans fight to purge the Obamacare rolls.

Trump, however, simply blamed the Democrats. “The Republicans are voting almost unanimously to end it, and the Democrats keep voting against ending it,” Trump said of the shutdown. “This has happened like 18 times before.”

Government shutdowns are, of course, nothing new. But it always works out, despite collective hyperventilation. Polls show that less than one-quarter of the country find themselves “very concerned” about the latest.

As the interview continued, Trump touted the new trade deal with China, the ceasefire in Gaza and his efforts to resolve the war in Ukraine. He even dispelled the liberal fever dream of seeking a third term.

Legal immigration, surging stock markets, modest diplomatic inroads and run-of-the-mill partisan bickering – it’s not exactly a groyper’s dream come true. Yet in-fighting has dominated right-wing discourse in recent weeks, perhaps to the greatest degree since Jan. 6 or even the launch of the original Never Trump movement.

The Young Republican group chat leak from mid-October – filled with racist snark – set off a cycle of denunciations and apologias within the right, with some saying the conservative movement must draw a line at genuine bigotry while defenders countered that those pearl-clutchers were simply useful idiots for the left. This continued with the leaked messages of Trump nominee Paul Ingrassia, and has now seemingly reached its peak after Tucker Carlson’s controversial interview with Nick Fuentes last week. Still, it’s all anyone seems to be talking about on X.

All of this has culminated in questions of whether the right can govern without tearing itself apart? But as Trump touts substantive and broadly appealing victories, the answer seems obvious to anyone outside an echo chamber.

The “discourse” seems hysterically detached from political reality, symptomatic of terminally online influencers too content to hear themselves talk. Far from radicalism running amok in the GOP, the CBS interview suggests the opposite.

In rare form, Trump did not in fact shoot himself in the foot. He didn’t go off on obscure tangents that appear inexplicable or scary to a CBS viewer. At the same, O’Donnell didn’t lean into the media’s most divisive attacks that have been used to demonize Republicans in the Trump era – Nazism, white supremacy or egregious “gotcha questions” designed to impart racist vitriol. She simply kept to the good old fashioned liberal bias.

Is the world healing? Are we returning to the days of civility politics that self-declared centrists so longingly yearn for? Is Trumpism now so dominant that it can govern as a milquetoast status quo? It’s surely too soon to say.