Last week, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was released from immigration detention. And I think it’s still worth talking about. You can really see the Abrego Garcia saga as the beginning of Trump’s decline when it comes to his handling of immigration. So, for a quick refresher, earlier this year, in March, Kilmar Abrego Garcia —— “Was mistakenly deported to a megaprison in El Salvador. The government blamed an administrative error. But a court filing revealed ICE was aware that the man had protected status to prevent his deportation.” Now, you might recall that as this was all popping off, that there was real debate over whether or not Democrats should respond. Remember, the idea was that Trump was strong on immigration, he was strong on controlling the border, and that directly trying to contest this might end up making Democrats look out of touch. In truth, we saw essentially the opposite: that Democrats did contest this. And rather than decline in the face of Trump’s strength on the issue, Trump declined in the face of pushback. His standing on immigration began to drop into the negative numbers, and that’s where it remained. What explains this? Public opinion is not one-dimensional, right? Voters can say that they approve of Trump on immigration. Voters can say that they want harsher immigration policies, that they wish for a harder border. But voters also believe that for people who are here lawfully, there should be some sort of path to citizenship. Voters also do not like to see draconian measures taken against people who are already here, even if they’re here unlawfully. And so once you understand that immigration views are happening across a number of dimensions, the dynamics of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and that saga make a little more sense, that Democrats were contesting not the wisdom of particular immigration policies, but the chaos and the lawlessness and the cruelty of the administration’s position. And voters are reacting against the cruelty of the administration’s position. The other thing I’d say here is that the administration consciously made this a debate over due process. And Democrats, I think wisely, also contested the administration on due process. Now, what’s important about this is that due process of law is a paramount American value. It’s something that, for lack of a better word, is very popular, and that trying to deny people due process, trying to deny people their day in court, is very unpopular. And so by shifting the debate away from even Abrego Garcia himself and away from immigration policy and towards cruelty and lawlessness and due process, Democrats end up shifting the ground on which voters were evaluating the president on immigration. The administration made, then, a strategic blunder, and Democrats scored a real political success. And I think Democrats should look at this entire thing with an important takeaway: that not only is it important to contest your opponents where they’re strongest, but to understand that you can approach any number of issues through different ways, that you don’t have to approach them on their terms. A fight about immigration doesn’t have to be a fight about the wisdom of immigration flows. It can be a fight about the openness of the country. It can be a fight about basic American values. The entire Abrego Garcia saga, I think, reflects one of the key weaknesses of the second Trump administration, one of the key political weaknesses, which is just hubris, which is just an unwillingness to really believe that one’s political opponents can successfully contest your attempts to control the field, as it were, and an unwillingness to back down and retreat to a safer position. They doubled down on the unpopular thing. They doubled down on the harsh thing. They doubled down on the cruel thing. And this has only diminished their standing. And I think it’s only going to get worse. And the question you’ve got to ask yourself, looking ahead to the next year, is what, if anything, can the administration do, will the administration do to improve its position to make itself more popular with more people? I can’t think of a place where the administration is willing to do any of that. And my expectation is that the administration will suffer political defeats even worse than the ones they’ve seen this year.