Transcript: Trump Press Sec Goes Off Rails on Fox amid New ICE Horror

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Now that Donald Trump appears to be largely drawing down his violent occupation of Minneapolis, the administration is resorting to a time-honored tradition: declare victory and go home. In a bizarre interview, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt went full cult and called the operation a resounding success. But she also spun it as targeting criminals, effectively revealing that it’s no longer possible to tell the truth about Trump’s actual mass-deportation agenda. This is a moment of unusual political vulnerability for Trump and the White House on this issue. But are Democrats doing all they can to exploit it? We think they’re not. So we’re talking to Anat Shenker-Osorio, a Democratic message strategist who often argues that Democrats let polls limit their ability to exploit critical political opportunities. Anat, nice to have you on.

Anat Shenker-Osorio: Thank you so much.

Sargent: So border czar Tom Homan announced this week that the “surge” in Minneapolis will now end because he doesn’t want to see any more bloodshed. Time will tell how real that is, but I can report that some people in the state do think it’s real. Now listen to Karoline Leavitt address the situation on Fox News.

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota has been a resounding success. It has resulted in the detention and deportation of more than 4,000 illegal alien criminals. Let me repeat: 4,000 illegal alien criminals just from Minnesota alone. And while the surge is coming to an end, immigration enforcement in Minnesota absolutely will not.

Sargent: So Leavitt calls this a resounding success, even though two Americans were murdered, there were massive outbreaks of violence and civil conflict, there’s been widespread public opposition, and Trump’s numbers on immigration have absolutely cratered. Anat, what did you think of that?

Shenker-Osorio: I guess when your entire job is shoveling crap and playing cleanup crew for the Gestapo and fascism, you’ve got to put some pretty nice wrapping paper on that. Obviously, what’s going on here—and it’s pretty plain for almost all of America to see, other than the calcified core of the MAGA base who will never, ever be moved—is that this is a regime of the bullies, by the bribes, for the billionaires.

They are hell-bent on destroying us. As I like to call them, they’re a MAGA murder regime, and they’ve proved it in every conceivable way. Here it is to the naked eye, and it’s horrifying. It’s just really putting into plain relief what, sadly, voters were incapable of truly understanding in 2024, which is that, you know, when someone prints, say, a 920-page document of their agenda, perhaps they mean to enforce it.

Sargent: Yeah. Well, it seems to me that Leavitt is talking in a way that reflects an awareness on the part of the White House political operation that people really do understand what the Trump agenda is actually about right now, because it’s been kind of bludgeoned into their heads by everything we’ve seen. What do you think of that?

Shenker-Osorio: The question is really: What did people internalize and understand the phrase “mass deportation” to be? It’s clearly not what’s going on here.

What Leavitt is doing is what MAGA has always done and what all authoritarians require, which is to foment a counter-revolution against a revolution that never was. It is to say to people, “We are going to protect you from those people.” And those people need to be dehumanized and portrayed as not merely “less than,” but an actual threat to us—in order to hide the fact that, actually, the minority in America that’s harming you is the billionaires.

Unless and until they can keep ginning up—keeping their base engaged and enraged around this idea that they are the strongmen who are getting rid of “bad people” and making you safe and all the rest of it—then you will ignore the fact that, basically, they’re screwing almost all of us over in every possible way.

Sargent: What did you think about her messaging there? And what did you think she was actually trying to do by calling everybody a criminal, when it’s apparent to everybody—through Instagram, TikTok, their phones—that these people are not criminals? Who are they talking to? What are they trying to do?

Shenker-Osorio: So, first and foremost, what they need to do is reassure their base because, in the dark corners of the internet where their base resides, they’re seeing people—not just in Minnesota, but outside of it—celebrate this as a temporary reprieve. You know, none of us are silly enough to think this means ICE is done doing damage in lots of places, but this is a win.

And so, you know, “team liberty and justice for all,” “team neighbor-ism,” is celebrating. And that, of course, pisses off the MAGA base. So, first, Leavitt needs to reassure those people: “No, no, don’t worry. We actually did our job. We actually did the task we promised you we’d do, and we’re going to keep at it.” Because they’re mad. They wanted the Insurrection Act. I mean, they plainly wanted an escalation. They don’t want a drawdown.

And then the second thing is that there’s not enough of their base in order to maintain this. And so they need to also continue to create plausible deniability for what they are doing and why they are doing it. And that argument, as you know, has always been that they are in Minnesota and beyond it in order to protect us and get rid of the “bad people.” Because sure enough, Americans are catching on that they are the bad people.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. And I just want to point out here that they actually got their bloodshed. Two Americans were murdered, and there were all sorts of other violent outbursts and major civil conflict erupting all over the city, and there was actual terror experienced by the local population. The core point, though, is that the bloodshed they got isn’t enough. They want absolute subjugation—meaning MAGA, right?

Shenker-Osorio: Yes, absolutely. They want absolute subjugation, and they want a justification of their worldview—that they are the “good people” who are restoring America, “making America great again,” and bringing us back to an era, an epoch, where the “good people” were in charge, they had total domination, and the “bad people” of all sorts were brought to heel and doing as they were told.

What Minnesota keeps showing over and over and over again is the moral clarity of people standing with and for each other across races, across origins, across accents, across faiths. And that is a fundamental sort of wound to the core narrative of MAGA.

Sargent: 100 percent agree. In fact, that’s exactly what’s getting people so pissed off. It’s the fact that white Americans are showing a lot of solidarity with immigrants. Now, let’s listen to a bit more of Karoline Leavitt.

Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): Mr. Homan was also able to achieve a level of cooperation with local police to arrest left-wing agitators when they are engaged in unlawful behavior, which has led to a calmer situation on the ground. You’re no longer seeing videos of these agitators engaging in unlawful activity to break up ICE’s operations, which, again, are continuing. Nothing will ever stop President Trump and this administration from targeted immigration enforcement focusing on the worst of the worst criminals in American communities, and that includes in Minnesota.

Sargent: Two things about this: First, note the eagerness to portray Trump and Homan as cooperating very effectively with local leaders. Now, that runs counter to Trump’s frequent effort to publicly treat Democratic local leaders like shit for sport.

And by the way, I just want to point out here—talk about something that’s going to piss off MAGA—this idea that Trump and Homan are actually trying to work with local Democrats. Like, MAGA just wants them to be treated, you know, like absolute garbage.

Second, note that Leavitt actually calls the operation “targeted at criminals” while also saying that they’re not backing down in the slightest. I mean, this is like North Korea cult propaganda stuff, but I think it shows that they’re in a weak position politically on all this. What did you think of what you heard there?

Shenker-Osorio: I completely agree with you that it shows that they’re in an indefensible position, and so they have to basically just invent verbal spaghetti or diarrhea or whatever.

I have a slightly different interpretation of when she is saying, “We have gotten cooperation.” What I hear her saying is: We have forced these Democratic elected officials—who have been naughty, naughty, naughty and misbehaving and disobeying and aiding and abetting bad things because they have the temerity to actually believe that all people have rights, God forbid—and now we’ve made them obey. We’ve made them cooperate with us. We’ve basically brought these naughty children to heel. That’s what I hear her saying.

Sargent: That is very interesting. I tend to think, though, that at the same time, at least part of the messaging seems to be directed at the middle of the country in the sense that I think that independents and moderates are extremely uncomfortable with the aspect of MAGA that treats half the country as “occupied territory,” as it were. You know what I’m saying?

Shenker-Osorio: I do, but actually the interpretation, as I understand it, is congruent with that. Basically, what she is saying to me is: “The reason why this thing got out of hand is because these Democratic—as they like to call it, ‘Democrat’—elected officials weren’t doing what they should. They were getting in the way. They were harming this ‘law-enforcement operation,’ as they would call it.”

And now that they’ve finally, sort of, straightened themselves out and did the right thing—purportedly collaborating with ICE, all of which is just invented bullshit—that’s why we can leave. The bloodshed is their fault. And that’s her justification to middle America for why stuff that, as you said, middle America isn’t pleased with occurred.

Sargent: Yeah. Their messaging is really tortured because it’s not really possible to make both MAGA and the middle of the country happy. I think that’s the essence of this.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, I agree.

Sargent: So we’re seeing this really awful news coming out of Minneapolis as well, which is that ICE is now admitting that federal agents appear to have lied about a confrontation that led to a shooting.

So it looks like what happened is that federal agents initially claimed that two men they encountered assaulted them with a broom and a shovel. And then one of the agents shot one of the two migrants, but that seems to have fallen apart. And prosecutors are saying new evidence contradicts the officers’ story. And it now looks as if ICE is basically admitting that the officers may have lied about the incident. What do you think of this latest turn?

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. So in order for the MAGA storyline to function—which, just to be clear, I don’t think that it does; I’m saying from their own perspective—they need everything that they’re doing to be framed, whether it’s inside of the Twin Cities or, you know, in another spot, as “evil forces”: immigrants and their misbegotten allies, leftist nutcases who are doing the wrong thing versus well-meaning law enforcement that is keeping us safe.

That is the story that they require. And what’s happened—and I would argue there were sparks and kernels of this, for example, with the “inflatable frogs” in Portland and the broader inflatable cast of characters—Minnesota has done it extraordinarily. It’s not the only place that has done it. Basically, to challenge that overarching narrative of who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad guys”: What is actually going on? What is the motivation? What is the outcome?

So, just focusing in on Minnesota, what I would argue has happened narratively—and we can see this in public opinion; we can see it in just streams of the discourse that we monitor across social media—they’ve flipped the frame. Now, it is people of good conscience of various backgrounds and colors and accents and so on versus the “evil regime.” And in that storyline, MAGA is the evil regime. And so this story about protesters purportedly assaulting ICE agents is part of trying to have that first story be true. But of course, it isn’t.

Sargent: Yeah, I think one way to think about this also is that a lot of mainstream America now, I think, sees very clearly that what ICE is doing in these cities has nothing in common with actual law enforcement. It’s wanton, destructive violence. It’s fascist violence, basically being carried out at the behest of Trump and Stephen Miller to essentially punish a population for being cosmopolitan, diverse, and pro-democracy.

And so they are, sort of, in a really difficult spot now because ICE is a pariah agency. It’s seen as fundamentally something illegitimate now—to control recklessly violent, crazed killers almost, it seems like in some of these videos. It really has that feeling to it. And so they—they really struggle at this point to make ICE violence look legitimate.

In cases like this, the story really falls apart badly for them when the ICE officers are said to have lied about being provoked into their own violence.

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. It’s also the broader point that the currency of modern life and politics, unfortunately, is attention. And, you know, there’s a Substack called Share a Voice that did a really, really beautiful rendering showing which topics—over the course of all of 2025 and into 2026—have ever, sort of, been in ascendancy as the top thing that are talked about across social media.

Basically, the short version of it is that in 2025, it was Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. And the only two moments in which some other topic eclipsed something Trump had said or something Trump had done—as kind of the most talked-about across various platforms—was the debate over Alex Pretti’s murder and the Epstein files.

And so they know that, like many other drugs, you have to keep taking bigger hits to get high. And so now we’ve got the attention economy onto not just the outlandish—to be kind—horrific, criminal, et cetera, things that Trump is doing constantly. Every day there’s another one in this kind of, I will command the attention; I will get the discourse to be about me.

Now, Minnesota sort of stole the spotlight, if you will, for good and for ill—and by ill, I mean the absolute horrors that have been visited upon those communities. But also they’ve stolen the spotlight by showcasing the heroism. Alex Pretti was murdered in an act of standing up for another person. And same, of course, with Renée Good.

And so that’s just, as we’ve been talking about, it’s complicated the narrative. And so trying to introduce this story that, actually, the protesters assaulted ICE—that’s another sort of gambit into the attention economy to go look over there, basically.

Sargent: Right. Or the migrants assaulted ICE—which just seems to have been the story that these ICE agents told.

All right. Let’s get to the rubber meeting the road now, which is Democrats. I think in many ways, Democrats are finding some spine on this stuff. And there are certainly some Democrats who are very good on it. No question about that. They’re condemning the brutality. They’re, you know, holding the line in some of these shutdown talks, trying to force reforms to ICE and all that. That’s all good stuff.

I still think, though, that there’s a missing piece from the point of view of Democrats. There’s something else Democrats could be doing here, which is elevating the idea that immigrants and immigration are good. Now, this is something you’ve talked about. I have a piece at TNR.com on J.B. Pritzker and Gavin Newsom—the Illinois and California governors—and how they have tried to crack new ways into figuring out how to fight the information wars on this stuff.

And one thing we talk about in the piece is that Gavin Newsom actually tries to elevate and bring more visibility to immigrants doing good things in communities. And you mentioned earlier that Minneapolis is doing this. I think Democrats could be doing more of it. Can you talk about that?

Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, thank you for asking the question. Unless and until there is a different prevailing narrative about who immigrants are and what they represent here in our cultures and communities, we’re always going to be on the back foot. And we’re going to be on the back foot morally, and we’re going to be on the back foot electorally.

Because Republicans, again, rely upon having this villain front and center in order that you not see that the actual—you know, if you wanted to know who took all your money, here’s a hint: It’s the people with all the money. That’s how you can tell.

And so as long as they can say, it’s immigrants that did this, or It’s inner-city crime that did this, or It’s trans folks that did this, or It’s women with the temerity to want reproductive autonomy over their own bodies, then there’s always going to be this made-up “other” that is to blame.

And while it is vital and critical—and it cannot be said enough how vital and critical it is—to rein in ICE and DHS and to understand that, you know, there is no reforming an agency whose mission is to actually harm and destroy. You cannot reform that. But that is not enough. That is not going to get the kids out of camps or close them. That’s not going to bring people home.

And it’s not going to create the conditions that we require to actually win big in this midterm and beyond it. Immigrants are neither villains, nor are they victims, nor are they “doing jobs nobody wants.” They are a representation of this dream and this courage that we’re supposed to admire.

Sargent: Anat Shenker-Osorio, thank you so much for saying all that. I really hope Democrats try and pay a little more attention to what Minneapolis is actually accomplishing. Thanks so much for coming on with us. We really appreciate it.

Shenker-Osorio: Thank you for having me.