As the thermostat turns

I think there are a couple of reasons why the administration largely reversed itself on cancelling student visas. My first guess is that someone with authority was told or figured out that while elite private schools can survive without the revenue generated by international students paying full freight, state schools in red states may be another matter. But the more important factor is that the administration understands that its most important political advantage is being squandered by overreach:

This deeply unsettling scenario appears not to be happening. And it’s not just because Trump quickly crashed the good economy he inherited. A genuine backlash to Trump’s ethno-nationalist authoritarianism may be starting to take shape on its own terms.

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll, released Friday, is only the most recent of many surveys to find Trump slipping underwater on immigration, which has been his best issue. The poll finds that a majority of Americans, 53 percent, disapprove of his handling of the issue, while only 46 percent approve.

But the Post poll is also notable for another crushing finding for Trump: He is badly underwater on immigration among independents. Importantly, this is true both on attitudes toward Trump’s handling of immigration generally and on the specifics. Here are the poll’s key findings in this regard:

• Fifty-six percent of independents disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, while only 42 percent approve.
• Sixty-two percent of independents oppose deporting international students who have criticized U.S. policy in the Mideast, while only 36 percent percent support it.
• Fifty-two percent of independents oppose sending undocumented immigrants who are suspected members of a criminal group to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing, while only 46 percent support it.
• Only 21 percent of independents want wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain imprisoned in El Salvador, while 39 percent say he should be returned to the United States. Here, many are undecided, but that abysmal 21 percent figure suggests Trump’s propaganda depicting him as a gang member who doesn’t deserve due process is a bust.

Trump is bleeding independent support in general. As CNN analyst Harry Enten recently detailed, aggregated polling shows that Trump is underwater with this demographic by 22 points, the worst ever in presidential polling.

Trump driving the economy into a cliff is not unrelated to this either — it puts everything he does in a more negative light.

Even some moderate pundits are beginning to see through the Cult of the Savvy Permanent Defensive Crouch on this:

If immigration is still the best issue for the Republican candidate in, say, summer 2028, then Democrats would be wise to let the issue drop. At the moment, however, time remains for thermostatic opinion to swing against Trump, and Democrats can help push it in that direction by highlighting the unpopular aspects of his agenda.

Trump’s actions have also opened up cracks within his coalition at the elite level. Conservative organs such as The Wall Street Journal editorial page and National Review have editorialized against his disregard for due process. The Free Press, another conservative outlet, surveyed seven legal experts, all of whom criticized Trump’s actions.

None of those publications commands the kind of mass audience that could turn Republican voters against Trump the way Walter Cronkite could make middle America question the Vietnam War. Yet their opposition indicates that Trump will struggle to maintain a unified front on this issue the way he has on other norm-violating actions where the conservative elite has mostly stood behind him. The overall tone of a debate tends to be much more skeptical when your own party’s expert class is divided.

Some Democrats nonetheless think it wiser to devote their attention to issues where they already have an advantage, rather than trying to create an advantage that doesn’t currently exist. That’s a sensible approach under normal circumstances. But these are abnormal times. Trump is attempting to open a loophole in the Constitution that would let him jail any person, criminal or not, citizen or not, in an overseas prison without recourse to American law. This poses a threat to the republic on a totally different scale than almost any other Trump crime.

Drawing attention to the issue can not only alert the American public to its dangers; it can also alert Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, to the depth of anger he is creating among Democrats. Trump’s foreign-prison loophole relies on the cooperation of overseas strongmen. If those strongmen are thinking about the possibility that Democrats might regain the presidency one day, and subject him to anything ranging from frosty diplomatic relations to a trial at the Hague, they might recalibrate their level of cooperation.

The fight over deportations is not just about immigration policy or approval ratings. Trump is attempting to use his advantage on immigration to secure terrifying powers. Before ceding him those powers, the opposition should try to deny him the advantage.

The president claiming the power to disappear people to foreign slave prisons is a fight you have to have irrespective of the politics — the foundation of constitutional government is at stake. But it’s very far from clear that the politics of this are even unfavorable to Democrats, and this applies to some immigration issues with less existential stakes as well.