(Photo by Peter Foley for Reuters)
President-elect Donald Trump has an ambitious agenda that he wants to get through Congress next year, but The New Republic’s Greg Sargent has found it’s facing “surprise resistance” from many Republicans.
At issue, writes Sargent, are Trump’s stated desires to rip up green energy subsidies and to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants would hurt the economies of many Republican-majority districts.
“One of Trump’s central campaign claims was that Biden’s green energy investments will cause enormous job losses in manufacturing sectors like the traditional auto industry,” Sargent contends. “In reality, the IRA is spurring an outpouring of private investment that’s creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in advanced manufacturing and well suited for people without college degrees—in the very areas that in MAGA folklore were abandoned by liberal and Democratic elites.”
And when it comes to immigration, Republican strongholds such as Texas are worried that mass deportations could cripple their construction industry that relies heavily on undocumented labor.
“Those workers enable the state to keep growing despite a native population that isn’t supplying a large enough workforce,” writes Sargent. “Local analysts and executives want Trump to refrain from removing all these people or create new ways for them to work here legally. Even the Republican mayor of McKinney, Texas, is loudly sounding the alarm.”
All of this suggests to Sargent that it’s possible “Trump’s deportation forces may selectively spare certain localities and industries from mass removals” while conducting high-profile immigration raids in certain blue states where Trump’s allies won’t be harmed.
