Rachel Maddow joins Nicolle Wallace on Deadline White House to discuss Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown and concerns around his growing unpredictability:

NICOLLE WALLACE, MS NOW HOST: The Trump administration now being forced to reckon with just how many deaths it will take before their mass deportation campaign becomes too toxic, even for the MAGA Republican Party, even as the families and the young children of these men are left to pick up the pieces, is where we begin the hour with our very special friend, my dear colleague, anchor of “THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW.” Rachel’s here. Hi. RACHEL MADDOW, MS NOW HOST, “THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW”: Hey, Nicolle, thanks for having me. WALLACE: Well, thank you for sort of putting — we have talked about this off camera, but there is a strategic purpose to the sort of cacophony of chaos. And when you lift a story up on a Monday, it’s a really important guidepost. And thank you for lifting this up on Monday night. MADDOW: One of the things that really struck me is, after I heard about this killing in Maine that morning, I started going through social media video, which is the first thing that we had, because it happened so early in the morning there wasn’t a lot of other sort of video running. There weren’t a lot of cell phone cameras around. So we had some security cameras, and we pretty quickly started getting in some social media video, just video from people in the neighborhood. And what I saw is, after that shooting in Maine happened at 7:17, before 8:00 in the morning, there were already people in that neighborhood out on the street, completely outraged, just cursing a blue streak at those ICE agents for what they had done. And the instinctive, visceral reaction of people in that community that this was wrong, they wanted this out of their community, they wanted justice for this kid who was killed, this young man who was killed, I thought, like, OK, like, follow the lead of what’s happening here locally. And then to see even before noon that same day, we had hundreds of people in small-town Maine out at the downtown park and then flooding into Susan Collins’ office and flooding into their own city hall. And there was then supposed to be a vigil being held that night at 7:00. Well, the noon thing never ended. It just got larger and larger and larger all day long until 7:00. It was even — and then it carried on until the next day. And I feel like all I have done with this story is kind of just observe what’s happening here. But I think it’s really, really important to know that part of the news of what’s happening in this era of the Trump administration is not just what Trump and Markwayne Mullin and all the rest of them are doing in terms of immigration enforcement, and this is how they’re doing it. It’s how the American people feel about it, and how they’re willing to react, and how they instinctively react with just revulsion and rejection of this. There’s no constituency for what they’re doing here. And they — I think they think they can keep doing it because maybe the MAGA base will rally to them for killing people like this in the streets. But it’s not happening, and the people are against them. WALLACE: Well, and what’s what’s interesting is that it’s sort of like all the stories from the first term where it would leak out that someone said something terrible about Donald Trump. There’s not a single counterexample, right? No one ever leaked out a story where they said nice things about Donald Trump. They just capitulate to him and then, privately, people like Mitch McConnell, who are reported to have called him, I think — quote — “the most despicable person” he ever knew. John Kelly described him as — I mean, the ICE body of facts and evidence only reveal one thing. So, the first thing that comes out is that they were not the targets, not that killing a target of an immigration enforcement would be justified, but these men were literally just caught in the crossfire of an incompetent and corrupt immigration policy. MADDOW: Yes. Yes. WALLACE: That seems to erode support from whatever the ostensible purpose is as well. MADDOW: Right. And I feel like some of the national discussion around this, some of the kind of like D.C.-focused media discussion about this is about how it’s so interesting that Markwayne Mullin doesn’t want the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to get the same kind of headlines that they were getting under Kristi Noem. He wants it to be quieter, as if this was a press problem, right, as if this was a publicity problem. WALLACE: Right. MADDOW: No, if you have got untrained, newly hired, totally unaccountable, totally incompetent, poorly led, gung-ho paramilitary forces who don’t identify themselves and have no chain of command in terms of what happens when something goes wrong, if you have them conducting 2,000 arrests a day, good or bad press about that is immaterial. People are going to end up dying because of their bad actions. And, I mean, even before the situation in Maine, obviously, we had the killing during another stop in Houston, as you said. But, last week in Detroit, the Detroit City Council came out and said, please can we stop having these totally off-the-hook, reckless high-speed car chases in residential neighborhoods after multiple buildings in Detroit were smashed into by cars involving — cars involved in these high-speed chases, for which all accounts are ICE agents are not trained? I mean, one of the — one of these situations in Detroit, a man ended up impaled in a residential neighborhood with building — with cars into buildings. But these guys are just out there playing “Dukes of Hazzard,” told that they have immunity, told that — we still don’t even know the name of the guy who killed Alex Pretti. And for an agency like that with that much money, empowered the way that they are, and that poorly led and poorly trained, them operating at the volume they’re operating at is the problem, regardless of whether or not it attracts headlines. WALLACE: The public opinion and the public’s role in this is something you have tracked since the first day. The public views immigration completely differently than they did two years ago. I think the latest poll in “The New York Times” on just the question of is immigration good or bad has 80 percent of Americans who think it’s a good thing. Now, it may be too late. DHS is now staffed to the gills with people willing to carry out these operations and funded to the nines. MADDOW: Yes. WALLACE: But the public is no longer remotely interested in what has become their mission. MADDOW: Well, yes, I mean, there’s nothing to brag about in the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement, right? Like, so they thought that it would be a good thing or a popular thing that they were going to build these 10,000-, 12,000-, 14,000 person mega-prison warehouses all over the country, right? And they thought they would just be able to buy these and site them places. And meanwhile, they start getting calls from Byhalia, Mississippi, where Roger Wicker is like, no, no, no, you’re not putting it here. They started getting calls from red states, all — from Utah, from Mississippi, from New Hampshire, from all over the country, everywhere they wanted to put them. There’s not a single politician, no matter how MAGA, anywhere in the country, that wants one of those things there. And so they had to radically scale that back when they had that opposition, not only from regular Americans, but from their own people. There’s nothing that they’re doing here that has any positive politically. And the moral, legal, and I think deeply operational failures that they have got in terms of the way that they are mistreating people and the kind of things they’re ultimately going to have to answer for, those things just compound over time, while they’re getting no benefit from it at all. WALLACE: One of the things that — I remember talking to Lee Gelernt, and you did a lot with our colleague Jacob ahead of his fantastic doc about child separation. And I remember in the transition between when Donald Trump won a second time and before he took office, I asked him what he was going to do to prepare for all the dehumanization that had taken place during that 2024 campaign. Trump started every rally — and we didn’t take him on TV, but people have talked about this. Every rally in 2024 started with sort of a montage of violent crimes carried out by people he claimed to be here illegally. And that’s sort of the ground-softening political move that leads to people waving “Mass Deportation Now” signs at his convention. That’s the sort of emotional underpinning of this incompetent and immoral policy. MADDOW: Yes. WALLACE: They have not focused really at all on violent criminals. I mean, there’s very — there’s I think like less than 6 percent of the people who have been deported are adjudicated violent criminals. MADDOW: Yes. WALLACE: And the Supreme Court added that adjudicated piece. They can’t send people off without due process. Do you think there’s any political boomerang coming back to Republicans? MADDOW: Well, yes. I mean, you look at the violent criminals and child molesters and people involved in child porn that Donald Trump has deliberately and individually pardoned, right, I mean, they’re trying to… WALLACE: Wants to pay them now too. MADDOW: Wants to pay them now too, maybe wants to hire them on at the Department of Justice or in sensitive jobs in the meantime. WALLACE: Yes. Yes. MADDOW: I mean, like he’s literally taken people who are convicted assaulters of police officers and people who are — who have been convicted of child molestation and other like unbelievably terrible crimes, and he’s pardoned them because they’re pro-him. WALLACE: Right. MADDOW: It’s — I don’t think the American people are blind to those sorts of things. It’s like J.D. Vance saying that he wants to — he’s like supposed to be the anti-fraud guy, but those press conferences, the anti-fraud things keep getting interrupted by news feed reports of Trump pardoning yet another convicted fraudster who found a way… WALLACE: Fraudster, MAGA fraudster. MADDOW: Who donated to his PAC. I mean, like, I’m sorry, people just aren’t dumb. You know, we can see all of these things at once. WALLACE: Yes. MADDOW: And so any political advantage I think they thought they might have been able to get from scapegoating immigrants as the cause of violence and fear and danger in this country, they have surrendered that political ground by arresting this — or not arresting, but killing this 26-year-old young dad in Maine and locking up — more than 70 percent of the people they have locked up have no criminal record whatsoever. They have got this radical expansion of the prison in Texas where they hold kids, right, women and kids. WALLACE: Dilley. MADDOW: Dilley. You have got literally Japanese Americans who survived the Japanese American incarceration during World War II marching on Dilley saying, let those kids out. We were kids held at concentration camps here in World War II, let these kids out now. What’s their answer to that? No, these kids are the worst or the worst? I mean, the political — the political ground here is like they’re like Wile E. Coyote. They have run off the end of the cliff. There’s nothing below them politically that is supporting what they’re doing. It is just criminal liability, moral liability, and humiliation. And Markwayne Mullin told ICE officers yesterday, OK, no more traffic stops implicitly, because, by the way, you guys are not trained at all in how to do them. WALLACE: You stink at them, yes. MADDOW: Trump undid that guidance, but there’s a reason Markwayne Mullin did that, is because he knows more people are going to die, and he doesn’t he’s going to have to be the one who answers for it. WALLACE: When you look at sort of the two years of coverage that you have done — has it been two years? I guess 18 months. Feels like 11. MADDOW: It’s been 47 years. WALLACE: Forty-seven years and a half. (LAUGHTER) WALLACE: What has changed the most? MADDOW: Since he’s been back in office? I think that he is — I know this — I don’t say this in a way that’s meant to be cheap, but I feel like he’s devolved in his own ability to communicate and to… WALLACE: Oh, totally. You mean the Islamic Republic of Japan doesn’t do it for you? MADDOW: Of Japan. No, it shockingly doesn’t. But, I mean, not only can he not find the let the words that are supposed to go together to make the nouns. He can’t form a political concept. So the — just as an example, this housing bill, right? Republicans got one concrete policy-related thing to run on… WALLACE: To run on. MADDOW: … that’s not taking away everybody’s health insurance, right? They want something else to run on, and they have got it, and they get it together, and Trump realizes, wait a second, that’s not about me. And so therefore he has to get rid of it. I feel like he could be — even if you didn’t agree with him, he could be a little strategic before, but he’s become so, I think, emotionally incontinent that he can’t control his own feelings enough to make politically savvy decisions. And so Republicans are having to try to make politics around him, rather than through him, like they used to be able to do, and it means that he’s the biggest bulwark and the problem — the biggest bulwark between them and potential electoral success in November. They have to figure out how to contend with that, and I think that’s why they’re such a mess right now. WALLACE: Well, I mean, the other major institution has to contend with that is the Pentagon, anyone involved in waging his war by social media post with Iran. MADDOW: Yes. WALLACE: I mean, I’m at a point where almost every day that I’m on the air between 4:00 and 6:00, there’s an announcement from CENTCOM that there are more strikes. And I don’t know that there was ever a stop. I mean, that never stopped. MADDOW: Right. WALLACE: I think you go back and track, like four days out of five, they’re announcing strikes in Iran. How do you — you take that emotional incontinence, you take the lack of a grasp of a strategic political concept and lay it over a war, how do you even cover what they’re doing in Iran? MADDOW: Yes. And, I mean, what do you think it was like at the Pentagon when Trump announced the new policy, which is going to be that we will be closing the Strait of Hormuz, and we, the United States of America pirate corps will be charging 20 percent of cargo to every ship that wants to come across? WALLACE: What are we going to do, go take inventory and then write a bill. I mean, what… MADDOW: But he’s the commander in chief and he’s saying that’s our new policy. What do you do sitting there at the Pentagon? I mean, whether you’re the FOX News guy, who’s like the — in charge, right, or whether you’re an operational commander, do you just wait until that obvious idiocy is negated by his next blurt? Or do you try to operationalize that in the meantime until you hear that it’s not happening? (CROSSTALK) WALLACE: Like, do you hold… (CROSSTALK) WALLACE: … and put in motion the guy that’s going to go charge the toll for the Strait of Hormuz that we don’t control, or do wait for the next post? MADDOW: You just wait for — yes, you would wait for it to be over. And it’s just — you know this as well as anybody. I mean, in — people who have those jobs, who have those operational jobs in some place like the Pentagon have some of the hardest jobs in the world with some of the highest stakes on Earth. And they are entrusted with incredible power because it is such weighty stuff that’s within their remit. And for them to have to contend with that clownish nonsense from somebody who purports to be in charge, while they can’t — while I don’t think most of the time he’s even in charge of his own faculties, it’s just not fair to them. It’s asking them to do a job that’s impossible to do. WALLACE: It’s so nice to get to do this job with you at the table. Thank you so much, Rachel, for being here. MADDOW: Thanks for having me. WALLACE: I’m so glad to see you in the flesh.

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