The Grandest Bargain

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, November 09, 2026

 

On Friday Stephen Miller was named White House chief of staff. I’m chuffed about it.

 

Honesty in politics is rare, especially under this administration, so I appreciate it when I see it. Replacing Susie Wiles with Miller is like a lizard person peeling off its skinsuit to reveal the monster underneath. Wiles was a placid professional mask of semirespectability on a snarling fascist project; repudiated by Americans and freed by lame-duckery from ever again needing to care what they think, the president has decided there’s no longer any need to keep up pretenses.

 

Like his boss, Miller has always seemed to me less a person than a personality type. Inspect any authoritarian movement in history, and you’ll find the two of them under other names: the charismatic megalomaniac at the head of the mob and the sadistic ideologue whispering in his ear to be more ruthless. More so than anyone in government, the new chief of staff embodies the foulest aspects of postliberalism—demagoguery, tribalism, obsession with purging undesirables, and slavish obsequiousness.

 

“I pledge to you, Mr. President, my absolute loyalty, my unwavering commitment, and my total devotion to your success and the success of this country,” Miller said on Friday evening at an event at Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump has his Roy Cohn at last and now, by extension, so do we. Americans are about to get their clearest look yet at what they empowered by electing these cretins in 2024.

 

That’s another reason I’m pleased with Miller’s appointment. It raises the odds of a second Republican wipeout at the polls in 2028.

 

No conservative can look forward to that without misgivings. A second blue tsunami two years from now would give Democrats total control of government, possibly with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. They’ll use that power irresponsibly in some ways, as all parties granted unchecked power do. But another drubbing for the GOP after two years of Miller steering this rocket into the ground might deliver what last week’s rout did not, a repudiation not just of Trump but of Trumpism.

 

If you want to convince the American right that its postliberal experiment was a disaster that must never be repeated, letting Miller spend two years grossing out already disaffected swing voters is a good way to do it. Maybe he’ll talk Trump into suspending habeas corpus for illegal immigrants, as he reportedly tried to do once before. Maybe he’ll have journalists arrested in hopes of squeezing them into giving up their sources, an idea allegedly opposed by Wiles but favored by Miller. Maybe he’ll keep rhetorically dancing on the graves of Americans killed by federal agents by smearing them as “domestic terrorists.”

 

Sources told the New York Times that Miller’s top priority as chief of staff “is rebuilding the fractured MAGA coalition and pursuing policies that will energize the voters who elected Mr. Trump in 2024,” which sounds like a fancy way of saying he intends to be more ruthless. Two more years of the White House behaving indifferently, or even antagonistically, toward Americans might get the president’s job approval down into the low 30s by the time the next election rolls around. And that might finish off this garbage movement once and for all.

 

On Friday, shortly before he announced the shake-up in the West Wing, Trump revealed to Ross Douthat of 60 Minutes what appears to be the first plank in the great “reenergizing MAGA” effort to come. With nativist fanatic Stephen Miller by his side, the president said he’s eager to pursue … a deal with Democrats to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.

 

Wait, what? What?

 

‘Too tough.’

 

No kidding. It wasn’t Douthat who broached the subject, either. Trump brought it up when asked to name one thing he’d like to work with the new Democratic majorities in Congress to achieve.

 

The mass deportation program has been “too tough,” the president allowed. “When you go into a hotel and you have a woman that’s worked there as, you know, as a maid, as a cleaner, as a this, as a that, as a waitress, a lotta good things, great jobs, and all of a sudden, they’re being taken outta the country, it’s tough,” he observed.

 

“There’s a group of people that I would say on the sort of pretty far right that would like everybody taken out,” Trump conceded, neglecting to mention that his new chief of staff is the spiritual leader of that faction. But the president appears to share the preferences of those who believe the White House should “work a deal” for nonviolent illegal immigrants “that are here, and in some cases here for 10 and 15 years.”

 

Why would a guy who wants to work with the left on comprehensive immigration reform, forging the grandest of potential grand bargains, put the one person in the White House who’s most hostile to that idea in charge of his administration?

 

Simple, you might say. Trump doesn’t actually want to work with Democrats on amnesty. He’s dangling the prospect of an immigration deal at them in hopes of persuading them to put the brakes on their plans to investigate him for corruption. There’ll be no cooperation on policy if they insist on waging war on him, obviously—but if they play nice, he’s suggesting, the sort of “border security in exchange for legalization” compromise that’s eluded Washington for years might be possible.

 

That might be what he’s up to. But I’m skeptical.

 

The strange truth is that the president has never been as militant about deporting illegals en masse as Miller and the right’s most racist elements are. In the past he’s shown sympathy for so-called DREAMers. He’s made promiscuous use of H-2B visas to hire seasonal foreign workers to do the proverbial jobs Americans won’t do at his various properties. He endorsed H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants when the right clashed over that topic shortly after he was reelected.

 

And as far back as February, he was reportedly telling advisers that “he wasn’t comfortable with how far Miller has gone on some fronts” on immigration, noting that business officials had called him to complain “about longtime workers being thrown out of the country.” The president may be a nativist, but he’s a rich country-clubbing entrepreneur first and foremost. He appreciates cheap foreign labor in a way that few of his devotees ever have or will.

 

In fact, if he does pursue an immigration deal with Democrats, it won’t be the first time.

 

In January 2018, he proposed “a path to citizenship for as many as 1.8 million young undocumented immigrants in exchange for an end to decades of family-based migration policies, a costly border wall, and a vast crackdown on other immigrants living in the country illegally.” That plan, co-authored by Stephen Miller, ended up going nowhere in the Senate because immigration proposals traditionally never go anywhere in the Senate, but if you’re dubious that Trump would ever spend political capital on an amnesty bill, be advised that he did so once before.

 

The timing of that 2018 bill was interesting in hindsight. A month earlier Trump’s job approval had fallen to 37.2 percent, which would turn out to be the worst number of his first term. (Worse even than after January 6.) Now here he is, a few days removed from the worst electoral blowout since Watergate, once again floating a major compromise on immigration. His attitude toward mass deportation resembles his attitude toward ending Roe v. Wade: He recognizes that the activists on his side support it but that most Americans do not, so when his political position turns precarious, he tilts toward trying to appease the majority at the expense of his base.

 

And he’s right in this case about what most Americans want. For someone so prone to self-delusion, Trump can be surprisingly clear-eyed about electoral realities. “I won on the border, and I won on groceries,” he said after he was reelected in 2024, alluding to high inflation during the Biden era. He was right. Two years later, he’s right again: Exit polling last week put ICE’s approval at 40-60 while 58 percent of voters said they believed the administration’s actions on immigration enforcement had gone too far.

 

Hispanics, the demographic affected most directly by mass deportation, broke 70-29 for Democrats last week. That was a 30-point swing from the 2024 election and nearly matched the magnitude of the landslide among that constituency that Republicans suffered in the last presidential election before Trump. (The party’s reaction to that rout was to propose—ta da—an amnesty deal.) The multiracial working-class coalition that MAGA thought it had built collapsed in one cycle thanks in part to “too tough” immigration policies.

 

Incentives for compromise.

 

I can’t imagine that Democrats will work with the president on immigration while Miller is on an authoritarian rampage in the executive branch, “cracking skulls” and contriving fake emergencies to justify new abuses of power.

 

The White House’s fash-y excesses will infuriate the left-wing base and make it impossible for likely Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Hakeem Jeffries to compromise with Republicans. If there were even a small chance of the two parties avoiding all-out war over the next two years, Trump putting a “wartime consigliere” in charge of his operation presumably extinguished it.

 

But let’s say I’m wrong about that and the two sides figure out a way to compartmentalize, cooperating sporadically on policy matters of mutual interest while tearing each other apart during oversight battles. Would comprehensive immigration reform stand the slightest chance of passing?

 

Actually … yes? “The slightest chance” means no more than 5 percent, but I do think that chance exists.

 

It’s a question of incentives. Historians are invited to correct me, but it may be that America has never before seen consecutive election cycles in which first one party and then the other suffered devastating losses for mishandling the same policy. Democrats lost the presidency and both houses of Congress in 2024 partly because the Biden administration was too lax about enforcing immigration law. Republicans lost both houses of Congress in 2026 partly because the Trump administration was too draconian about enforcing it.

 

Last week’s wave swept numerous left-wing candidates into Senate seats in red states like Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, and (probably) Mississippi. To improve their chances of holding those seats in 2032, Democrats will need to show those states’ right-leaning majorities that they aren’t as hostile to border enforcement as they were during the Biden years. To improve their chances of winning them back, Republicans will need to show those states’ swing voters that they aren’t as hostile to nonviolent illegal immigrants and the “domestic terrorists” protesting ICE as they were during the first two years of Trump’s second term.

 

Hispanics in particular have emerged as a critical, arguably decisive bloc over these last two cycles. Trump nearly won the group outright two years ago en route to reelection; Democrats annihilated Republicans among Hispanics this year en route to the largest congressional popular-vote margin in more than 50 years. Left and right each have no choice but to compete aggressively for this cohort going forward, and competing aggressively evidently means rejecting the alienating immigration extremism of their respective activist wings.

 

Simply put, both sides have considerably more reason to embrace an “enforcement for legalization” trade-off than they did in 2018, the last time Trump offered the left a deal. And on paper, it’s doable.

 

Come next year, Democrats could have as many as 56 Senate seats, requiring just four Republican votes to beat a filibuster and get a compromise bill to the president’s desk. (Assuming that all 56 Democrats support the bill, that is—a hugely questionable assumption given how “poison pills” have tanked immigration bills in the past.) Could there be four GOP votes in favor in the chamber if Trump champions the deal, giving Republicans cover from the right-wing base?

 

Well, the famously maverick Lisa Murkowski will still be there and looking for ways to play to the center in Alaska. Florida’s Ashley Moody will be up for a full six-year term in 2028 and should worry about Hispanic support after beating a far-left challenger in last week’s special election by less than 3 points. Ted Budd of North Carolina just watched Democrats win a Senate seat in his own home state by nearly 20, giving him good reason to tack toward the middle. And Iowa’s Chuck Grassley is 93 years old and uncertain about running for reelection, making him the wildest of wild cards.

 

Sixty votes isn’t likely. But the gravitational realities of American politics before last Tuesday and since last Tuesday are not the same.

 

‘Trump Care for All.’

 

To pass an immigration bill, Senate Democrats will need to steel themselves against pressure from progressive activists.

 

The left will oppose any compromise, believing that the party is likely to have total control of government after the next cycle and can write its own amnesty bill without enforcement concessions to the right. But that’s precisely why Democratic leaders should prefer a bipartisan compromise now: An amnesty-heavy security-light agenda in 2029 would risk reantagonizing Hispanics and would be difficult for James Talarico and other red-state liberals to defend. Partnering with Trump gives Democrats an excuse to moderate.

 

More importantly, a deal before the next presidential election would neuter Republican “open borders” attacks on Democrats in the next cycle. “We can’t wait until 2029 to bring the undocumented out of the shadows!” Schumer and Jeffries might say to leftists, recycling a favorite metaphor of immigration doves.

 

Trump, meanwhile, will need to steel himself against pressure from right-wing border hawks, a constituency that wasn’t thrilled with his 2018 immigration offer and is newly skeptical of his leadership after last week’s electoral debacle.

 

The more ambitious his proposed compromise is, the more viciously those hawks will turn on him. The mystery—one of the biggest in politics following the blue tsunami, in fact—is whether he’ll care. Does a man who’s always seemed to view his return to power in terms of pure self-indulgence, an opportunity to punish his enemies and build ballrooms and get rich, give a flying fig about what his base wants now that he’ll never again need to worry about an election?

 

Frankly, he might quietly savor the chance to sign comprehensive immigration reform.

 

Trump has always loved the idea of doing big audacious things that his predecessors couldn’t or wouldn’t: meeting with Kim Jong Un, attacking Iran, seizing Venezuela’s oil, expanding America’s map by adding territory like Greenland. Democrats understand that about him and will seek to exploit it. Yesterday incoming Sen. Abdul El-Sayed made the president an offer regarding single-payer healthcare: “If he wants to pass Trump Care for All, which will guarantee health care to everyone and put his name on it like he’s putting his name on everything, I’m game.”

 

It isn’t crazy to think that a man so desperate for lasting legacies that he tried to give JFK second billing on the Kennedy Center beneath his own name would leap at an opportunity to make “Trump Care for All” happen. And guess what: Unlike immigration reform, single-payer healthcare might plausibly qualify for passage by a simple majority under the Senate’s budget reconciliation rules. Democrats, a party that could soon have 56 votes in the chamber, would need only 51 to put it on the president’s desk.

 

You might be the only president with the juice to get this over the finish line, they’ll tell him. Do you want to be remembered as the man who saved American healthcare? Or do you want to be remembered as the man who vetoed it, allowing us to take all the credit for ourselves if we manage to get this done with a Democratic president in 2029?

 

The danger of handing over your party to a man who prioritizes his interests over your ideology is that, well, he’ll prioritize his interests over your ideology. Trump’s second-term agenda, which has been startlingly left-wing in some respects, reflects that. And as he immerses himself fully in his “YOLO phase,” he might logically be willing to follow his own preferences at the expense of conservative dogma even more ruthlessly than he has over the past 10 years.

 

He didn’t get into politics to serve Republican voters; he got into politics so that they could serve him. Now that he no longer has any use for them electorally, it’s anyone’s guess how much or how little he’ll take their views into consideration when Democrats offer him a chance to make history—especially on paradigm-shifting initiatives like comprehensive immigration reform or Medicare for All that poll well.

 

“At some point I suspect Mr. Trump is going to turn on his party,” Peggy Noonan wrote last week following the tsunami. “They didn’t deserve him, they let him down, he tried to help them but they wouldn’t let him. It’s going to be real bunker talk. It’s how he was probably always destined to wind up, swiveling around from the desk and telling the audience it’s fired.” There will be plenty of “bunker talk,” it’s true—making Miller chief of staff is the first murmuring—but resentment and retribution might not be the president’s only motives for betraying his party.

 

Securing landmark legislative achievements, which he’s failed to do despite his own party having controlled Congress for four of his six years as president, might be another. If Democrats are willing to help him belatedly secure the sort of legacy that Republicans couldn’t (a big if!), he’ll hear them out. Possibly whether Stephen Miller, skull-cracker, likes it or not.