When Trump De-Escalates — 2/2/26

For most of his career, Donald Trump has been somewhat of a human escalator. He moves in one direction. He is neither fast nor flexible, but he is unyielding. He rarely alters course or retreats, and when he does, he never admits it. When he (frequently) enters political combat, his well-practiced instinct is to intensify the conflict to force his opposition to back down. 

But that may be changing. In the aftermath of the horrific killing of yet another Minneapolis resident who died last week at the hands of government employees for exercising his First Amendment rights, Trump announced that he intended to “de-escalate a little bit.”

Because death looks bad on television, Trump was reacting to the sudden and sizable shift in public opinion in reaction to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of his Administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcements agents. The American people have consistently supported more restrictive border and immigration policy for many years now, a sentiment that has allowed Trump to employ increasingly severe methods to achieve his goal of reducing the number of migrants entering the US. But this is something different.

Trump has achieved many of his goals on this front. The number of refugees and asylum-seekers has dropped so dramatically that our country’s overall population might actually drop this year for the first time in history. But there has been a growing discontent among voters who support a crackdown on hardened criminals toward the aggressive ICE tactics that have swept up those with no criminal records beyond their residency status, legal immigrants and considerable numbers of American citizens.

Public opinion on Trump’s anti-immigration agenda was beginning to cool even before Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. While most voters still support the deportation of undocumented violent criminals, there has been a growing unease—and a growing partisan divide—over the ICE apprehensions. Immigration was still the issue on which Trump received his highest marks from voters, but those numbers were dropping.

 But in the days since Pretti was shot, we have witnessed the most dramatic shift in public opinion on this issue in decades. Politicians of both parties scrambled to catch up: outraged Democrats promised a fight over funding for the Department of Homeland Security and uneasy Republicans tried to find ways to express their disapproval of the killings without directly criticizing Trump. Although some GOP conservatives are promising a fight, it now appears that there will be some constraints imposed on ICE personnel to offer greater protection for their targets. The next two weeks in Washington will be the scene of the type of Republican retreat that has rarely occurred in the Trump era. 

Trump himself has not backed off completely, of course. He has harshly attacked the mayor of Minneapolis and other local politicians, as well as Pretti himself. But his outreach call to Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer last week to jump-start negotiations, along with his decision to replace Border Patrol firebrand Gregory Bovino with more measured border czar Tom Homan and to temporarily sideline DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, suggests that Trump senses the need to ease up before his signature issue becomes a problem for Republican candidates facing voters this fall.

Trump knows how much the outcome of the November midterm elections will impact the remainder of his presidency. He is clearly preoccupied with the prospect of another impeachment, which is a virtual certainty if Democrats regain the majority in the House of Representatives, and raises the prospect in public frequently. The irony that immigration—which has always been his political life raft in the past—might now threaten that majority is palpable.

But Trump also understands he needs to be careful of straying too far from his base. His most loyal supporters are already uncomfortable with his growing interest in international relations and his Justice Department's mishandling of Jeffrey Epstein files. And Trump’s suggestion that Pretti should not have been carrying a gun has not gone over well with Second Amendment advocates. He can’t afford MAGA nation to think he’s going soft on immigration. 

Many conservatives, both on Capitol Hill and the Administration, hope the current furor will subside enough to get away with rhetorical backtracking rather than substantive retreat. But the Democrats see the polls moving in their direction and seem atypically focused to ride this fight as long as they can. It won’t be surprising if this election year is determined by how and whether Trump does retreat.