Suddenly, Trump’s Ugliest Threats Are Facing Surprise GOP Resistance

There are still nearly two months to go before Donald Trump assumes the presidency again, but Republicans or GOP-adjacent industries have already begun to admit out loud that some of his most important policy promises could prove disastrous in their parts of the country.

These folks don’t say this too directly, out of fear of offending the MAGA God King. Instead, they suggest gingerly that a slight rethink might be in order. But unpack what they’re saying and you’ll see that they’re in effect acknowledging that some of Trump’s biggest campaign promises were basically scams.

In Georgia, for instance, some local Republicans are openly worried about Trump’s threat to roll back President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The IRA is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into incentives for the manufacture and purchase of green energy technologies, from electric vehicles to batteries to solar power. Trump endlessly derided this as the “green new scam” and pledged to repeal all uncommitted funds.

But now, The New York Times reports that Trump supporters like state Representative Beth Camp fear that repeal could destroy jobs related to new investments in green manufacturing plants in the state. Camp worries that this could leave factories in Georgia “sitting empty.”

You heard that right: This Republican is declaring that Trump’s threatened actions could leave factories sitting empty. 

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. 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.

Now Republicans are declaring that repeal of the IRA is the thing that could create empty factories. Another Georgia GOP state lawmaker tells the Times that repealing tax credits encouraging the use of solar panels could make local manufacturing “jobs disappear.” House Republicans from districts benefiting from these investments are also primed to resist.

All this directly undercuts one of Trump’s biggest ideas—that government efforts to spur the transition to a sustainable future must by definition existentially threaten the working class, whose well-being depends on tripling down on fossil fuels—and exposes it as the monumental scam that it is.

Something similar is also already happening with Trump’s threat to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Reuters reports that agriculture interests, which are heavily concentrated in GOP areas, are urging the incoming Trump administration to refrain from removing untold numbers of migrants working throughout the food supply chain, including in farming, dairy, and meatpacking. 

Notably, GOP Representative John Duarte, who just lost his seat in the elections, explicitly tells Reuters that farming interests in his California district depend on undocumented immigrants—and that Trump should exempt many from removal. Duarte and industry representatives want more avenues created for migrants to work here legally—the precise opposite of what Trump promised.

Now over to Texas. NPR reports that various industries there fear that mass deportations could cripple them, particularly in construction, where nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants toiled as of 2022. Those workers enable the state to keep growing despite a native population that isn’t supplying a large enough workforce. 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.

Meanwhile, back in Georgia, Trump’s threat of mass deportations is awakening new awareness that undocumented immigrants drive industries like construction, landscaping, and agriculture, reports The Wall Street Journal. In Dalton, a town that backed Trump, fear is spreading that removals could “upend its economy and workforce.”

At this point, someone will argue that all this confirms Trump’s arguments—that all these industries and their representatives merely fear losing cheap migrant labor that enables them to avoid paying Americans higher wages. When JD Vance and Trump pushed their lie about Haitians eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, Vance insisted that he opposed the Haitian influx into Midwestern towns because they’re undercutting U.S. workers.

But all these disparate examples of Republicans and GOP areas lamenting coming mass deportations suggest an alternate story, one detailed well by the Times’s Lydia DePillis. In the MAGA worldview, a large reserve of untapped native-born Americans in prime working age are languishing in joblessness throughout Trump country—and will stream into all these industries once migrants are removed en masse, boosting wages.  

But DePillis documents that things like poor health and disability are more important drivers of unemployment among this subset of non-college working-age men. Besides, migrants living and working here don’t just perform labor that Americans will not. They also consume and boost demand, creating more jobs.

As Paul Krugman puts it, in all these ways, migrant laborers are “complements” to U.S. workers. Importantly, that’s the argument that these Republicans and industries in GOP areas are really making when they lament mass deportations: Migrant labor isn’t displacing U.S. workers; it’s helping drive our post-Covid recovery and growth. This directly challenges Trump’s zero-sum worldview.

Put it this way: These Republicans and industries are, in a sense, calling Trump’s bluff. Will he actually target those sectors for mass deportations? If he does, we should see a large inflow of U.S. native-born workers into those jobs, right? Will that really take place?

Here’s another possibility: In the end, Trump’s deportation forces may selectively spare certain localities and industries from mass removals. Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, suggests this won’t happen. But a hallmark of MAGA is corruptly selective governance in the interests of MAGA nation and expressly against those who are designated MAGA’s enemies, U.S. citizens included. One can see mass deportations becoming a selective tool, in which blue localities are targeted for high-profile raids—even as Trump triumphantly rants that they are cesspools of “migrant crime” that he is pacifying with military-style force—while GOP-connected industries and Trump-allied Republicans tacitly secure some forbearance.

Indeed, there is historical precedent for something like this. In one infamous 1990s episode, Georgia lawmakers intervened to get immigration authorities to back off deportations during the state’s Vidalia onion harvests. 

It’s easy to imagine a MAGA Georgia Republican like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who doesn’t care about actual policy outcomes, quietly making a similar call on behalf of the local gentry. As American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick told me: “With enforcement likely to expand dramatically under Trump, we can expect this pressure to come to bear again.”

At the most basic level, Trump-MAGA “American carnage” mythology holds that reversing the elite-engineered energy transition and purging the nation of millions of undesirable migrants are key to rescuing left-behind areas from stagnation—and rebuilding the foundations of virtuous, long-term working-class flourishing. In reality, the green transition and immigration are potential keys to revitalization. It’s striking to see Republicans already more or less confirming this themselves.