846: This Is the Cake We Baked

Ira Glass

So this week, lots of people looked at the election results and thought, yeah, this is the country that I thought it was. And for some people, that was a really hopeful thing, and others, kind of the opposite. And let's start with the winners. I'm joined in the studio right now by Zoe Chace.

Zoe Chace

Hello.

Ira Glass

Hey there, Zoe. So election night, you and I were in Michigan together, and you got to go to the Republican victory party.

Zoe Chace

I did.

Ira Glass

Let's bring in the sound.

Ira Glass

There it is.

Zoe Chace

As I walk in, the polls were closing. The results were starting to come in. I have to say, I walked in kind of prepared for the last war, like the last election.

Ira Glass

Explain what you mean.

Zoe Chace

Well, I know a lot of these Republicans in Michigan. I know they've been mobilizing, for years, an army of poll watchers and poll challengers and lawyers to challenge the results of a fraudulent election. So I come in expecting super tight results, and a long fight, and tension, and anxiety, and suspicion.

[CROWD CHEERING]

Ira Glass

And?

Zoe Chace

That is not what I found.

[CROWD CHEERING]

Zoe Chace

It's Eric Castiglia, longtime Republican activist. He runs a PAC called Brighter Michigan. He believes the last election was rife with fraud-- not this one. In fact, there was never a moment, once the count started, where anyone in this room wasn't believing the results.

Ira Glass

Well, yeah, because it was all breaking their way.

Zoe Chace

I know, but also, these are the people on the ground who ran the ground game in Michigan, and they were feeling really good about what they did.

Ira Glass

So it was obvious to them they were going to win way before it was obvious to you.

Zoe Chace

Yes, very much. Like, when I was talking to Amber Harris-- we first met last year. She's a Republican activist.

Zoe Chace

She's right that more people came out. The Republican vote in Michigan was unprecedented. Trump got more votes than he did last time he ran in Detroit, in the surrounding suburbs, in almost every county in the state of Michigan.

Ira Glass

OK. So then, at some point in the night, Trump wins.

Zoe Chace

Yes, much earlier than I was expecting.

Ira Glass

Let's hear some sound of that.

Ira Glass

Thank you.

Zoe Chace

And I see a guy breaking down crying at the front of the room. He's the regional director for Macomb County.

Ira Glass

And that's true-- some people. And some did not.

Zoe Chace

Yeah, I believe I've heard that.

Ira Glass

Somebody I had checked with a couple of days after the election was Danny Hodges. He's a Washington, DC, policeman who was one of the officers who defended the Capitol building back on January 6. He was beaten. Somebody tried to gouge out his eye. He was trapped by the crowd at one point, and a man took his nightstick and hit his head. In the wake of that, he's testified in Congress and at the trials of a number of people who attacked the Capitol, including one last week.

And when I talked to him, he said something that I heard from a bunch of Democrats. It's like, it wasn't just disappointment he was feeling, but a whole feeling that I can only describe as "whoa."

Ira Glass

Today, after the billions of dollars spent and the countless hours of literally hundreds of thousands around the country who knocked themselves out for this election canvassing, donating, poll watching, doing everything they knew how to do, now, here we are, still a divided country, staring at each other across an abyss, but with a clear winner.

We thought what we could do here on our show is spend some time with a few of the people who felt very strongly about the outcome of this race, who have a special, personal investment in it, looking ahead with them to what's next. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life, Act One-- our act names today, by the way, are quotes from the president-elect-- "The Largest Deportation Operation in American History." So mass deportations are coming. Donald Trump promised it. People waved mass deportation signs at his rallies. It was the first item on the Republican Party's platform this year. And at the Republican National Convention, Tom Homan, the guy who ran ICE under Trump, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, had a message for undocumented immigrants-- you'd better start packing now.

President Trump has claimed he's going to be able to deport between 15 and 20 million people. His Vice President, JD Vance, said the number is lower, that they could do one million people per year. But Donald Trump and his team have never spelled out exactly how they would do this. Our producer, Nadia Reiman, wondered about that, and looked into what mass deportation could actually look like if and when it comes to pass.

Nadia Reiman

I was kind of unfazed at first when I heard about Trump's mass deportation campaign promise. I've been covering immigration for years. There are so many undocumented people here that we can't even keep count. The closest estimate is 13.3 million. So it's a big job to round up all of these people and to send them back to countries that may not take them. It's expensive. It's time-consuming. It's a crazy task.

But then I was talking to a source inside the Department of Homeland Security. And I said something like, I mean, I know there's no way Trump can do this mass deportation thing. And they stopped me. They were like, oh, sure, it can happen. They said it so casually, like it was a given. So I wanted to talk to someone who could break down how. Like, exactly how could you do something so massive?

I tried talking to Tom Homan. He's rumored to be the next ICE director under Trump but has denied there's a written plan for mass deportations. And he ghosted me. Jason Houser, however, was eager to talk. He was the chief of staff for ICE under Biden for a couple years, has been working for DHS on and off since 9/11, mostly in enforcement.

He's passionate about all of this, in his wonky, government guy way. I talked to him for 3.5 hours, asked him basically to play pretend, game some stuff out with me. What would happen in the first 100 days? If he was in charge of ICE, what could he do to carry out this mass deportation mandate?

Jason thinks that, first of all, the new Trump administration will immediately start to prep for this-- like, the day after the election, this week. They would start talking to law enforcement in different cities and getting them to agree to cooperate, hit the ground running in January. ICE would talk to home countries to get them to agree to take people back. And after those two things align, Jason says, ICE could decide to deport someone and they'd be out of the country within 24 hours.

Nadia Reiman

One of the things ICE would have to work around is which nationalities to deport first-- you know, if you wanted to make the most impact. A lot of countries don't take their own people back. Venezuela, for example, hardly accepts any immigrants back. Brazil only accepts two to four flights of immigrants a month.

Nadia Reiman

Jason says ICE can focus on getting people in eight major cities with airport hubs-- Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, Houston, Miami, Denver, New York, and LA. Those have access to quick ICE flights to people's home countries. Jason thinks ICE can get people out before they can get to a judge or a lawyer.

And one way to catch a lot of people quickly, especially the ones who snuck in and ICE has no info on, is to bring back worksite enforcement, a.k.a., large-scale raids. The Biden administration stopped doing those.

Nadia Reiman

Can you walk through what that would look like? What do you think that would look like?

Nadia Reiman

Tom Homan has not denied this, by the way. He's said publicly something like this would be necessary. Homan also said he would do national security threats first-- but then raids, sure. Jason says the raids under a 2.0 Trump administration could be more militarized, with SWAT-style teams. That's not how they've been done in the past. He also told me he thinks nothing would stop ICE from going into hospitals or schools or churches. Normally, ICE doesn't do that. But this is just a policy, not a law.

So after doing these raids and trying to get people out quickly, ICE would be left with lots of immigrants that they have to hold until they can get them deported. I wanted to know, where would you hold all these people?

Nadia Reiman

Dangerous because Jason thinks there would be fights, riots. People would be hurt, possibly even die, he thinks. And just so I'm clear here, yes, he means immigrants, but also officers. Jason's very concerned about the safety of the ICE officers.

Nadia Reiman

A million people. Of course, Jason's predicting here, assuming there will be no major roadblocks. But the Brennan Center did this thing where they stress tested with experts and government people whether mass deportations could be done, gamed this all out. In their simulations, funding was a big obstacle right away, so their deportation numbers weren't as large as Jason's.

But that was also assuming that the House wouldn't go Republican, which is looking like it will be as I record this. That would make Jason's math of a million people more possible. And when a million people disappear from the country, it's more than just bodies gone. There's ripple effects.

Nadia Reiman

And so those that are left behind, it's like they become ghosts. They might stop showing up to work. Maybe they'll move. You'll notice them missing-- at your local grocery store, your bar, your daycare. And at the same time, your screens will be broadcasting the deportations on TV, on social media, shouting the images of a million who are actually gone. Jason thinks this will be strategic.

Nadia Reiman

I'm not so sure. I think it's way harder for the pendulum to swing back. If you look at the Democrats' immigration platform, what you see is the border bill that Biden tried to pass. That bill is the most restrictive immigration bill we've seen in years. It's a child born out of the Trump administration but also parented by the Democrats, making a harsh agenda seem way more middle of the road.

Think piece after think piece uses this failed bill as an example of how far to the right we've moved on immigration, how much enforcement and severity have taken over, how much the idea of a nation of immigrants is dusty and Pollyanna-ish. This fall, a Brookings poll said that about a third of Americans agree with Trump's quote, that undocumented immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country-- "poisoning the blood."

This phrase chills me. It's not about legality or order. It's visceral. It's guttural repulsion. It is a violent feeling about a massive group of people. And when the President is the one that leads it, it's not just a feeling anymore. It becomes an action.

Ira Glass

Nadia Reiman. She's an editor on our show.

Two days after the election, two of our producers, Emmanuel Dzotsi and Lilly Sullivan, went to this church near her office in New York City where, on certain days, there are migrants and asylum seekers getting free legal advice and meals. And they met this guy, Roberto, who told him that he arrived in the US five months ago from Ecuador. And he's been having trouble sleeping ever since Election Day. Lilly now joins me in the studio. Hey, Lilly.

Lilly Sullivan

Hey, Ira.

Ira Glass

So you spoke with him.

Lilly Sullivan

Yeah. He's been staying in a shelter nearby. And he says he can already picture it, what the ICE raids there would be like.

Lilly Sullivan

He says, let me describe it like a movie. He pictures a group of 100, 200 men arriving, who'd lock up the building and go floor to floor.

Lilly Sullivan

No one would be able to get out.

Lilly Sullivan

And they'd load them up into buses or cars or whatever ICE uses and deport them. Like, that's what you hear about. So that's what he imagines about how it might go.

Lilly Sullivan

On the streets, he feels a little freer, he told me, because if someone tried to grab him, he could just run. He'd have that option.

Lilly Sullivan

But in the shelter, he's between four walls. There's nowhere to run.

Lilly Sullivan

I asked him, where do you feel safe? He told me, here, in the church where I talked to him. There's no other place where he can feel calm. Because he tells me, ICE can't come into the church.

Ira Glass

Though, of course, in President Trump's next term, that might not be true.

Lilly Sullivan

Yeah. We have this idea of sanctuary spaces. But anytime ICE decides they want to go into churches or hospitals or schools, they can do that.

Ira Glass

Act Two, "Nobody Loves Our Latino Community and Our Puerto Rican Community More than I Do." So Donald Trump won record numbers of Latino voters this year, more than any Republican candidate since they started tracking that demographic in exit polls back in the 1970s. So how'd it happen? Ike Sriskandarajah spent the day with a guy who's been gunning for this for years.

Ike Sriskandarajah

I first met Sam Negron a few weeks ago outside a Trump rally in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He's waiting in the VIP line because, one, he's a constable. That's like an elected sheriff. And, two, he volunteers a lot for the campaign-- knocks on doors, does phone calls, is something called a Trump Force Captain, and works with Latinos for Trump.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Sam's a proud Puerto Rican-- big guy, classic cop haircut. And he gets personal fast. When I tell him Ike is my nickname, he says, we tend to do that in America-- shorten things. Then he calls me his brother.

Ike Sriskandarajah

We're surrounded by long lines of Trump supporters who start chanting because they see a protest coming down the street. It's maybe a couple dozen people waving Puerto Rican flags. They're with a Latinx social justice group here to protest the "island of garbage" comment that a comedian recently made at a Trump rally.

Ike Sriskandarajah

A couple of Sam's friends from Latinos for Trump rush over. They're going to cross the street to go confront the anti-Trump protesters. And they ask Sam to join.

Ike Sriskandarajah

He tells them, I don't like to fight. Let them speak.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Another Trump supporter nearby, a white lady in a red shirt, is shouting over us at this whole scrum of Spanish speakers, not really differentiating between the Trump supporters and the Trump protesters. She says, they don't even speak English. Go back to your own fucking country.

Ike Sriskandarajah

For most of his life, Sam supported Democrats. But in 2016, he broke with the party, protest voted for Jill Stein. He got into Trump from videos shared by a Latino Trump supporter. Then, just in the past two years, he lost both his son and his son-in-law. They overdosed on fentanyl. He says it's a big problem in Allentown. And he felt like the Democrats and Biden weren't helping. It made him want Trump back even more.

So he started evangelizing, trying to convert people. He's got lit and signs-- Boricuas for Trump, Dominicans for Trump. He's got these little scratch-offs for Trump. It was lonely at first in this Democratic city, but slowly, it started to feel like it was working. He'd been stepping it up for months. And then "island of garbage" dropped on him.

Ike Sriskandarajah

It was hurtful because that's where they're from, but also frustrating, because he's been out here in these streets, trying to pull his people one by one towards Trump.

Ike Sriskandarajah

So how to reconcile all this, being a proud Puerto Rican and a die-hard Trump supporter? For Sam, it took 20 minutes of googling.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Here's how he explains that there was actually a deeper message hidden inside that joke.

Ike Sriskandarajah

20 minutes of research got Sam from livid about a potentially campaign-derailing bad joke to outrage at an environmental disaster he lays at the feet of the Biden administration. If that sounds like opportunistic reasoning, Sam gets that.

Ike Sriskandarajah

So he went on a mission, the weekend before the election, to do damage control, tell people what he learned and get them to vote for Trump. He also wanted to give people a chance to talk through the ways they felt let down by Democrats. I tagged along because I wanted to know if people would buy it. And part of what I heard helped me understand why Trump took a historic share of the Latino vote.

And the way Sam's doing it, he's not following an orderly list of registered R or independent voters. He's going off-book. Here, in the Supremo Grocery Store parking lot in the heart of a Latino neighborhood, it's a busy Sunday. There's a lot of shoppers, steady flow of people on the sidewalk. It's a target-rich environment.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Sam spots a Puerto Rican woman he knows pulling into the parking lot.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Damned if I do, damned if I don't, she yells from the car. This is Melissa. Sam and her clearly go back. But he says he doesn't know how she's going to vote.

Ike Sriskandarajah

She's upset about Democrats giving support to new arrivals in the country instead of focusing on the people already here, people like herself. She also doesn't tolerate insults against Spanish-speaking people. So she doesn't like her options.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Sam walks her through how he figured out the island of garbage comment is actually a sneaky PSA about landfill mismanagement. Melissa listens.

Ike Sriskandarajah

How does that sit with you?

Ike Sriskandarajah

Not true-- illegal immigrants can't vote.

Ike Sriskandarajah

The backdrop here is that Sam and Melissa are Puerto Rican. They're already citizens who can vote if they live on the mainland. They don't have to wait in any sort of line.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Eight years ago, Melissa supported Hillary. She says Bill Clinton was a hell of a president. Now, she likes Trump, in spite of the comment.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Melissa ends the conversation by telling Sam she'll vote for Trump. Sam approaches another Puerto Rican guy, a soft-spoken young man named Marcus, and asks him how he felt about the insult.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Sam takes Marcus through his spiel, from livid to landfill-- seems like it's sinking in. They talk more about the price of eggs, which is smart, given Marcus just left the grocery store. And after Sam finishes, I asked Marcus how he feels about Sam's explanation about the island of garbage.

Ike Sriskandarajah

He's still pissed about the comment, but he was planning to vote for Trump anyway. And Sam's explanation?

Ike Sriskandarajah

The next guy, a Spanish speaker carrying a large bag of dog food, didn't even need to hear Sam's explanation. He just wants to share his critique of the Democrats' failures. Here's Jose.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Jose is saying that neither party wants to fix immigration. Obama had two years to do something when the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate, and they didn't.

Ike Sriskandarajah

He's voting for Trump too. The garbage joke, people can get past that. But what they can't get past is how Democrats have been letting them down in a bunch of different ways. Sam is pleased.

Ike Sriskandarajah

Sam did talk to one Harris supporter, a younger Dominican man.

Ike Sriskandarajah

The man says he can't vote. He'd like to become a citizen, vote someday. Again, this is where a traditional canvasser would pivot. That's not Sam.

Ike Sriskandarajah

If he could vote, he'd vote for Kamala. Hey, there's one. Now, this close to the election, campaigns are a numbers game of maximizing turnout of eligible, like-minded voters. This guy is neither.

Ike Sriskandarajah

The guy says he wants a change. Sam sees an opening-- a change from what?

Ike Sriskandarajah

Sam makes his pitch for Trump and asks him to think about it.

Ike Sriskandarajah

To Sam, it's the long game. This isn't just about the election that just happened. It's about the next one and the next one and the one after that.

Ira Glass

Ike Sriskandarajah is a producer on our show. Coming up, all those people on Trump's enemies list who he's been calling for retribution against, are they packing their bags? We check in with a couple. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program-- "This is the Cake We Baked." Today, we have stories of people who have some special, personal investment in the outcome of this week's election, and we look at what's coming for them. We have arrived at Act Three of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Three, "Come Retribution." So in the final weeks of his campaign, Donald Trump only stepped up his threats of retribution against his political enemies, including saying he'd use the military to go after the enemy within. Two people who've been keeping an eye on these sorts of comments are Alexander and Rachel Vindman. Alex is the army officer who officially reported what seemed like an improper phone call between President Trump and the president of Ukraine, which led to Trump's first impeachment trial. Rachel is his wife.

Back in March, I visited them. And they did not agree about what they were going to do if President Trump won another term and started taking revenge. Rachel said they should consider leaving the country if things got bad enough. Alex said he'd never consider that.

Ira Glass

We were doing this interview in their living room. And we were standing, because they hadn't bought furniture for it yet. They wanted to wait and see what the outcome of the election was going to be first.

For Alex, this was just prudence and saving money against an uncertain future. For Rachel, it was, maybe we'll have to leave this house. When I reached out this week after the election, Alex didn't return my text to set up an interview, but Rachel was happy to talk. She told me they did finally bite the bullet and buy furniture in those early days when Kamala Harris took over as the Democratic nominee.

Ira Glass

In the months leading up to the election, Alex and Rachel have both been campaigning actively for Harris, speaking at fundraisers, that kind of thing. Rachel says she's probably done three events a week for the last six weeks, on video or in person, in all seven swing states.

We'd had plans to talk on election night once the winner was clear. But when I texted them, Rachel wrote back she didn't feel up to talking. "I am freaking out," she said. When we got on the phone later in the week, I asked if their views had changed since we talked in March. Was it still that she would consider leaving the country and he wouldn't?

Ira Glass

This is a list that was circulating on social media, put together by a Trump supporter, the people that he thinks deserve revenge. He has no affiliation with Trump. There's no sign that anybody in Trump world listens to him. But seeing Alex's name there was alarming, a reminder of how visible Alex is as somebody who stood up to the president and how likely a target he is for the real people in power.

Ira Glass

They're going to keep an eye on his appointments, especially who he appoints as Secretary of Defense. Rachel pictures that retaliation against Alex could be as small as they try to take his retirement benefits, his health care, pension, or as big as they could put him on trial for his actions in the impeachment hearings. She really doesn't know what to expect.

Ira Glass

Rachel Vindman. We reached out to the other people we interviewed in March for the episode we did about possible retribution Donald Trump might take to see how concerned they are about what might happen to them now. Former Trump aide Stephanie Grisham didn't return our calls. Fred Wellman, who used to be at the Lincoln Project, said he was watching to see how things were going to unfold. And he's gaming out possible scenarios for what he might do.

Ira Glass

Act Four, "I've Done an Unbelievable Job on the Abortion Question." So I think, as everybody knows at this point, Kamala Harris and the Democrats were betting that abortion rights would help put her over the top. And 10 different states had abortion rights measures on their ballots. Seven of those passed. And there was a very particular kind of TV ad that aired in many of those states, all with a very particular feeling and particular music, very similar language.

In these ads, women whose lives have been put at risk from complications with their pregnancies told their stories to explain why abortion bans needed to be lifted. One of our producers, Miki Meek, became interested in these commercials. And this week, she checked in with a few of the people who appeared in them. Here's Miki.

Miki Meek

Since Roe was struck down two years ago, I've been reporting on pregnant women and doctors in states with abortion bans. And I've noticed that it's almost always the same group of women, about 20 in all, being called on again and again to recount the worst moments of their lives in media interviews, in court cases, at their state legislatures, and in Congress.

Miki Meek

That's Kimberly Paseka, who was denied an abortion in Nebraska. She shared her story in one of those ads.

Miki Meek

Nebraska's abortion rights measure failed this week.

Miki Meek

Her parents are Catholic, and before this, they were against abortion. But seeing her experience up close changed them. So when the organizers of the ballot measure in Florida approached her to do a TV ad, she said yes. The measure would put abortion rights into the state constitution.

Miki Meek

In the ad, Deborah is sitting on a couch in a green dress. Her husband, Lee, is right next to her, his arm wrapped around her.

Miki Meek

Governor DeSantis fought the abortion measure hard. He sent plainclothes police to knock on doors looking for fraudulent signatures on the petition for the ballot measure. The Florida Health Department sent cease and desist letters to TV stations, airing a different ad that supported the measure. A judge siding with the TV stations wrote, "To keep it simple for the state of Florida, it's the First Amendment, stupid."

On election night. Deborah and her husband headed to a watch party with organizers of the ballot measure, a group called Yes on 4. There were balloons everywhere, a full bar. Deborah felt hopeful and had a speech prepared if the measure got passed. Ever since Roe was overturned, whenever voters got a chance to vote on abortion measures like this one, they passed, even in red states.

Around 9:00 PM, the results were in. A clear majority of Floridians voted in favor of the ballot initiative, but it still failed because in Florida, ballot measures need 60% of the vote to pass. It got 57%.

Miki Meek

It's one thing to decide to tell this painful story over and over, but it's another thing to do it and not get the results you wanted.

Miki Meek

What people don't see when Deborah tells her story in public is how hard she's still trying to get back to real life, just enjoy small moments again-- karate classes on Thursdays, pizza night on Fridays with her husband and her six-year-old son.

Ira Glass

Miki Meek is a producer on our show.

["MORNING IN AMERICA" BY DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS]

Ira Glass

Well, our show today was produced and edited by Laura Starcheski and Emanuele Berry. The people who put together today's program include Bim Adewunmi, Phia Bennin, Dana Chivvis, Sean Cole, Michael Comite, Emmanuel Dzotsi, Hany Hawasly, Valerie Kipnis, Henry Larson, Seth Lind, Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson. Ryan Rumery, Alissa Shipp, Alix Spiegel, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Marisa Robertson-Textor, Matt Tierney, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor's Sarah Abdurrahman. Our senior editor's David Kestenbaum.

Special thanks today to Andrea Flores, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Jonathan Blitzer, Miriam Rosenbaum, Colin Jackson, Jon Smith, Patrice Johnson, Fields Moseley, Jen Fifield, Ben Giles, Yvonne Wingette-Sanchez, Ben Terris, Neil Makhija, Rebecca Tyrrell, Drew Reisinger, Kathie Kline, Paul Choi, Jordan Green, Lee Dorbert, Adama Bah, and Candice Braun and Power Malu of Artists Athletes Activists in New York City.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. To become a This American Life partner and get bonus content, ad-free listening, ask me anything sessions, and a greatest-hits archive of hundreds of favorite episodes right in your podcast feed, sign up at thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners. Thanks this week to life partners Kira Elert, Rachael MacFarlane, Martha Stroud, and Lauren Talerman.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he is such an annoying person to meditate with, seriously. Every time we're finally into it and have quieted our minds, he starts chanting super loudly--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

["MORNING IN AMERICA" BY DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS]