I mean, these are people who came when the civil war was at
its height in Somalia in the 1990s.
These are not largely people who have come in the last few years.
They want to do a crackdown there.
And we've already seen, haven't we, the ICE raids around the
country, people being literally snatched off the streets.
And obviously they're getting very worried in Minnesota right
now. Hello and welcome to this week's
edition of Trump World. Anushka, how was your
Thanksgiving? Oh, it was lovely.
Thank you, Matt. I went to a beautiful place
called Duck in North Carolina. You have a Turkey in duck.
Very appropriate. Amazing.
And it was my first Thanksgiving in America.
I've always done Thanksgiving in the UK actually, but I didn't
try. Have you ever tried?
I forget what it is now with the marshmallows.
Have you ever? It's sweet potatoes, isn't it?
Have you ever? Tried I make it, it's my
signature dish and it is are. You serious?
I can't even imagine liking it. It's not so disgusting.
Because it's really quite disgusting in some ways, because
it's like chemistry on top of vegetables.
I mean, marshmallows are probably the worst thing that
that mankind can ingest. Well, today's not the day to
discuss American food, but I have to say it's been one of the
things I've found most interesting since I've been
here. Now, do you know what Donald
Trump did for Thanksgiving? Well, he first of all, of
course, he pardoned his Turkey, the White House Turkey, the day
before. And then I'm assuming that he
had a sumptuous Turkey dinner at Mar a Lago.
But actually what he really did, what really gives him a great
amount of joy, is to go on social media and rant.
And this is what he said. So this is what other people are
tucking into their Turkey, adding the condiments, you know,
holding hands around the table and saying thank you to all the
great things that have happened in that year.
Donald Trump said this only and then in caps.
Reverse migration can fully cure this situation.
Other than that, happy Thanksgiving to all except those
that hate, steal, murder and destroy everything that America
stands for. You won't be here for long.
End of quote, end of social media post.
So I guess you know he never takes any time off work, does
he? He's always on the job.
Yesterday I was watching the very long as usual, cabinet
meeting by Donald Trump and then he took this turn about Somali
people and let's just listen to what he said.
I don't want him in our country. I'll be honest with you, OK?
Somebody would say, oh, that's not politically correct.
I don't care. I don't want him in our country.
Now we actually aren't playing all of it, not because we want
to sanitize it, but because it is just so offensive and people
don't really want to listen to all of it.
He talked about people in Somalia being garbage.
He, he has this real thing for Representative Ilan Omar, who is
AUS citizen by the way, but he talks about people like her,
other people from the Somali community going home.
Like I said, he called them garbage.
I mean, Matt, you have seen so much, you have heard so much.
Do you still have the capacity to be shocked?
Yeah, I mean, I think that's the whole point, isn't it?
Just as just when you're getting used to the new normal of
something that Trump has said, he says something else that
makes you pay attention. It's all part of his attentional
economy, the way he, you know, grabs the headlines and and
grabs our minds and deflects perhaps from things that he
doesn't want to talk about like, you know, Jeffrey Epstein or the
fairly miserable state of the economy or, you know, the cost
of living or inflation, things like that.
So he's very good at making everyone pivot to the thing he
wants us all to talk about. Just want to say about the
Afghan, the 29 year old Afghan man who, by the way, you know,
is, is a husband and a father of kids who drove all the way, you
know, across the country to, you know, allegedly commit this
crime, to which he, by the way, has pleaded not guilty.
He worked for the American forces while they were occupying
Afghanistan for I think almost a decade, including at some stage
for the CIA. He was brought in under a scheme
that was started by Joe Biden after the chaotic departure from
Afghanistan. And then actually, his asylum
claim was approved while Trump was in office because President
Trump did go out of his way to blame, you know, Afghans in, you
know, this guy in particular, obviously, but also Afghans in
general for having been brought into, you know, into America by
Joe Biden. But actually, let's not forget
that it was actually President Trump who first made the
suggestion that America should leave Afghanistan many years
ago. And this guy had his asylum,
say, asylum papers approved under Trump when he was
president this year. Having said that, you know, this
is an excuse for Donald Trump yet again to unleash on people
that he likes to unleash on. And he does this, you know, at
regular intervals. But every time he does it, it
gets more violent. I don't think it's a knee jerk
reaction to what happened in Washington, DC last week.
I think it is the absolute driving ideology of this
government to crackdown on immigration in this way.
But they are obviously using this as what they see as an
opportunity. And, you know, I mean, let's
just pause for a minute and just just talk about the two victims
in all of this. Sarah Beckstrom, who was killed,
was only 20, and Andrew Wolf, 24, has been fighting for his
life. It was a terrible, terrible
crime, as you say. He has pleaded not guilty to
this, But it was a terrible crime.
But I was standing in the briefing room in the White House
on Monday, and I was packed in 'cause it's always completely
packed with journalists. And Caroline Leavitt, the press
secretary, began by talking about the two National Guard
officers who were killed and obviously very, very badly
injured. And then she turned and she
turned to what they really want to talk about.
And I have to say, Matt, I've, I'm not easily shocked.
I would like to say, but I felt like really shocked by what I
was hearing. I was standing there, You know,
I mean, I don't know if this makes a difference or not.
You don't need to be an immigrant or a child of an
immigrant to be shocked. But as a child of an immigrant,
maybe I felt it even slightly sharper than I might have done.
She talked about the disorder and violence, basically arguing
this was unleashed by all Afghans, in fact, not just all
Afghans. They were talking about
immigration much more broadly by that.
She was talking about people draining welfare.
I think later on we'll get to some of the statistics about the
reality of the economic impact of immigration.
It came alongside. And I just want to read this out
and then I just want to ask you about it.
Christy Noem, the secretary for Homeland Security, went on
Twitter. And again, capacity to be
shocked you think be numbed after 20 odd years as a
journalist. Still, I'm I'm just totally
shocked by it. I just met with the president.
I'm, I'm recommending a full travel ban on every damned
country that's been flooding our nation with killers, leechers
and entitlement junkies. Our forefathers built this
nation on blood, sweat and the unyielding love of freedom, not
for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry
our hard earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to
Americans. We don't want them, not one.
And then yesterday, Donald Trump turning this to Somalis living
in Minnesota. There's, he's talking about
revoking their temporary protected status, which is
actually, we think, probably only relevant for a few hundred
of the Somali community. The vast majority of them are
American citizens, many of them born and bred in America.
And he has absolutely gone for them in a kind of really
shocking way. I mean, what do you think the
impact of this will be for many of people in that community?
And do you agree with me that it's not a knee jerk reaction
that this runs through the thread of what they want to do
as a government? Well, I mean, remember, Donald
Trump started his first political campaign in 2015 when
he came down the golden escalator in Trump Tower on 5th
Ave. with a speech about Mexicans being, you know, being
murderers and rapists and bad hombres.
And some of them are good people, he acknowledged.
But that that was his calling card to get into politics.
That and the Bertha campaign against President Obama famously
claimed that he shouldn't have been president because he was
born outside America, which of course, was nonsense.
But he made the president proffer his birth certificate to
prove him wrong. That's how he started.
That's how it all began, you know, 10 years ago.
So he's been doing this ever since.
But as soon as he got into office in 2017, the first thing
he did was ban immigrants from from visitors from Muslim
countries. He then put the whole green card
process on hold. I know this because I was
applying for a green card at the time because I thought I might
want to go back to America at some stage.
And suddenly my lawyer ran and said it's all been frozen.
So he's been messing with, you know, different levels of
immigration, asylum seekers from desperate parts of the world,
people who just want to work in America.
He's been doing it all along. What's different now, I think
Anushka, is that it's, first of all, it's confusing.
It's a bit like the tariff policy.
We don't really, no one really knows where they stand at the
moment because it's also raw. And remember, this is policy
that could potentially undo years of, you know, of paying
tons of money and going to lawyers, you know, suddenly
upended or maybe not. You know, it'll be challenged in
the courts, I'm sure. Will the Supreme Court then rule
with those courts or rule against them?
We don't know. But if you're someone who's
lived in the country, you know, legitimately, let alone
illegitimately, you're going to feel really scared.
So I think consider, I mean, for a nation that is based on
bringing bring me your huddled masses in the famous
inscription, you know, the Statue of Liberty, that is based
on immigration. And this is one of the joys of
America, one of its strengths. This is what had made America
great. To see the whole structure of
immigration undermined like this I find deeply troubling.
And I'm not even living there as an immigrant.
Obviously the reaction this week has been specific things.
They're going to re examine all of the asylum claims of the
Afghans who came in 2021 and that, as you say, the actual
decision on this man who has been suspected in this crime was
made under Trump. But the scheme, I think it was
called Operation Allies Welcome happened under Joe Biden and,
you know, and suddenly all of them are being tarred like this.
So that's all being examined. Caroline Leavitt seemed to
suggest that there had been national security warnings to
the White House under Biden. I wrote to them and asked them
about that because she said reportedly, as in in the
newspapers, I wrote to the White House and said, well, you must
know about it if it was a warning to government.
And they just directed me back to Caroline Leavitt's words.
So no more detail on that. They're also, this is what he
says, pausing all migration from third world countries.
I mean, is there a kind of particular, you know, definition
of that? And then they're warning
threatening a crackdown on the Somali population in Minnesota.
They're talking about a case that involved fraud.
There were dozens of Somalis who were, you know, caught up in
that. And they're using that as an
excuse to say this huge settled population, which, by the way,
the vast majority of has been there for decades.
I mean, these are people who came when the civil war was at
its height in Somalia in the 1990s.
These are not largely people who have come in the last few years.
They want to do a crackdown there.
And we've already seen, haven't we, the ICE raids around the
country, people being literally snatched off the streets.
And obviously they're getting very worried in Minnesota right
now. So, so the the this threatened
crackdown is in Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Let's just hear how the Democratic mayors have reacted
to this. Our values and our commitment to
the Somali community, to every community of immigrants and
people in our city is rock solid and will be unwavering.
Our police, many of whom are Somali themselves, are trusted
partners in keeping people safe. They will not collaborate with
any federal agency around doing immigration enforcement work.
Our city staff and our law enforcement will not ask the
question as to whether an individual is documented or not.
And by the way, there are more than 80,000 Somali people living
in mini in Minnesota. Almost all of them are both
documented and citizens. The last thing that we need is
federal agents coming here pretending that we should be
afraid of somebody just based on the color of their skin, just
based on what they look like, just based on what country their
ancestors claimed as a as as honor, as a motherland.
I mean, you know, what the mayor just referred to is essentially
that if you look, if you look different, you know, I mean,
different as in if you have dark skin, whether it's from Africa
or Latin America, you know, forget whether you're a
convicted criminal or not, or whether you're there legally as
an American citizen, you run the risk of getting arrested by ICE
officials. And then you're in this sort of,
you know, terrible maelstrom of of of legal fees and going to
judges and lawyers to try and get out of detention or
deportation. And that's just not happened in
such a random way before. And of course, I think a lot of
it. Anushka, I wonder what you think
is driven by the ideologue behind Donald Trump on that is
immigration 1. Stephen Miller, what do you
think? Yeah, this is his deputy chief
of staff. And I think, you know, his
writing is all over this. And as I said before, not a new
thing, something you reported on greatly in Trump 1.0.
And now we're appointing again, reporting again on in Trump 2.0
all over the executive orders. I mean, they had on day one
signing executive orders talking about an emergency on the
southern border, an invasion. And I was really interested in a
response that Stephen Miller actually made on social media to
a Wall Street Journal, which is a conservative newspaper article
about all of this, which basically made the point that
you don't punish everybody for one crime.
You don't punish an entire, you know, population.
And also warnings about the fact that actually, and again, we'll
come to these stats, Immigration has been a huge economic boom
for America over many years. And there is a positive to it.
And he basically wrote back and said that this was the kind of
big lie, if you like, about immigration, this idea that
you're importing individuals. He basically said no, no, you're
importing societies and made absolutely clear that he thought
that the society where these people were coming from were
broken and therefore they would break American Society.
And that is the thing that runs through all of this.
I mean, my nature is to look at these things, not, not what
Stephen Miller says, but you know, what the government is
doing and assume that there isn't a kind of gobbling racist
ideology below it. But it is quite hard to think
that when you hear what they're saying again and again.
And, you know, just one of the examples of what they did with
an executive order immediately and now they're really hammering
down on this is they've basically closed the door.
This is a predominantly Christian country that has
basically closed the door on people fleeing persecution.
Their target for 2026 was is 7 1/2 thousand and Caroline Levitt
was very open about this at the briefing this week.
Vast majority of them only white people fleeing discrimination,
you know, is what they say. Farmers from South Africa, which
I, which I do think really shows you this.
They want to do stuff retrospectively.
They want to review green cards. Trump says he wants to take the
permanent out of permanent residency.
I mean, I mean, the Somali population in Minnesota, which
is very large because a lot of people settled and then people
came to the same place, lots of young people, lots of people
have been reacting to this. I think people are quite bemused
almost about his obsession, obsession about this particular
population. I mean, there's lots of humour
if people are looking for it on TikTok and Instagram, people
making fun of him over all of this.
And a lot of these people are naturalised citizens or, or just
born and bred Americans. And, you know, it's, it's just
worth just pausing for a minute. The thing that he's talking
about, temporary protected status, TPS, is something that
is put in place for people who have come from countries where,
you know, there are ongoing civil wars.
Things are really still very unstable.
One big population is Haitian communities around America.
I did, you know, with the team, we went to Charlotte.
Roy eating the. Dog, you know, which Donald
Trump basically repeated this disgusting lion myth about
eating their pets in Springfield.
OH, I, I, I went to Charleroi in Pennsylvania about this.
People absolutely terrified because you talk about TPS like
it's just a new thing. People had been there, you know,
since, you know, 2010 in the case of Haiti.
But but I almost don't want to talk too much about TPS because
it's not really about TPS because the vast majority of
Somalis in America are Americans.
And, you know, they don't want you to think about that or know
that. And they're just going after
them in a very brutal way. I mean, it is worth saying and,
and we can both talk about this is, is obviously people have a
right to be upset and angry and scared about immigration levels.
And there was huge immigration over the southern border under
the Joe Biden years. And, and one of the things they
did was they ended up with a large amount of immigration in
some of the more Democratic cities.
And actually the population was shocked by that.
Do you think that was a big contributor to Donald Trump
winning again? Oh, absolutely.
I mean, you know, the one thing I heard throughout the campaign
was cost of living, immigration, cost of living immigration over
and over again. And you know, from some
Republicans, it was on the immigration front.
If this isn't sorted out, if he doesn't come into office again,
this will be, this will spill the end of the American way of
life. It'll be the end of our
Republic. It'll be the end of democracy.
And I think one of the things that we fail to appreciate in
this nation of immigrants founded on immigration is that
the numbers of people coming across from South of the border,
from the Western Hemisphere, from Latin America, where they
really only speak one language. I mean, it's mostly Spanish.
Some of them, obviously in Brazil, speak Portuguese.
That has changed the kind of culture of America more than
previous waves of immigration from different countries.
You had the Irish and for that, of course, the English.
Then you had the Italians and then you had people from all
over Europe and there were sort of pockets of immigration and
they've still left their imprints.
So Minnesota, which he talked about earlier, which has a big
Somali community, also had a big German community.
And you can still see the evidence of that, you know, in
in Saint Paul and Minneapolis, the same thing in Wisconsin,
lots of German themed restaurants with waitresses
wearing dundles and so on. But but nothing was sort of
overwhelming. And I think for people, if you
talk to people in the Trump administration and you talk to
Republicans who want to turn the clock back to the 1950s and 60s,
this isn't just about a perceived alleged racism.
It's also about a panic, an actual panic that they're being
overwhelmed by a Spanish speaking culture and
civilization. And if you go to, you know,
Texas or to California or to Florida and you, you ring up any
public agency, what you hear on the phone in Spanish is.
Or prima Uno para Ingles E dos para espanol.
The first language of reference is Spanish.
You press 1 to speak English, press 2 to continue in Spanish.
And that is, it's kind of, it's something that a lot of
Americans aren't used to. And I want to ask you and Uska,
as someone who's just arrived in America, you've only been there
a couple of months with your family.
Does this stuff, does this immigration stuff make you
personally feel uncomfortable about being there?
Well, I certainly I have been surprised by how things are a
lot worse than I expected them to be when I came and how scared
people are, people who are legally in this country are
worried about this because nobody knows what is going to
happen at any moment. And yeah, I think it is.
That's the. Point of the Trump polity to
make people feel insecure, even if they've been there for years
as American citizens. Yeah, and also I think he is
responding to a genuine fear in the country about the levels of
immigration. And you know, I often think
about this, comparing it to reporting I've done in the UK.
I remember in 2016 making a film about immigration ahead of
Brexit. And I went to six different
parts of the country and I heard a lot of people who were really,
really scared about immigration. I remember being on an open top
UKIP bus when I was reporting, talking to UKIP politicians and
people were cheering this open top bus.
And I remember standing in a square in Lee in the Northwest
and at me about immigration, including, by the way, one
person who was Polish and one person who was a black woman who
was, you know, the child of immigrants.
And I just remember thinking to myself, like, obviously, and I
would like to talk about some of the stats.
Obviously some of the things that people are scared about are
not true, but some of the things that people are scared about are
true. You know, I went to
Peterborough, where the level of scale of immigration had been so
fast and so kind of discombobulating for the local
population. But people genuinely had seen
everything change around them, the type of shops that were
around them. I went to the doctor's surgery,
and the doctors were like, we're very pro immigration, but it has
really changed the challenges that we're trying to face with
here. The school had had more churn.
And when you look at the stats, it's very easy to just sort of
scream about one side or the other, you know, scream falsely
as some in Trump's administration do, that they're
taking all our benefits. I mean, I think we could
actually Fact Check. I think Donald Trump talked
about immigrants, sort of, you know.
Earning. 30,000 and taking $50,000, I think we can quite
flatly say that is not true. If you look at cost and benefit
in that way, immigrants hugely contribute to society in
America. They're also 60% less likely, by
the way, to commit crimes than people who are born Americans.
But, but they wouldn't have you think that.
But it's also true that, you know, the people who shout at
the other end of the spectrum on this, they just put in more
money. And it's completely untrue that
there are any challenges. Also not true, you know, because
many of those statistics don't take into account the impact on
public services, the impact on housing, other things that are
quite hard for you to kind of, you know, get your teeth around.
But but America has nevertheless been built on immigration.
The thing I find really quite hard to kind of fathom, which is
quite different I guess to the UK, is that every single person
who's talking about how immigrants are ruining our
country is the, you know. Daughter or son?
Of immigrants somewhere along the line and and like I say, the
stats do show they do show that overall immigration has brought
economic, you know booms to America, but you can't.
You can't, you can't imagine America without it.
But I mean, in, in terms of what you've described, you
experienced when you were, you know, doing your films and you
were reporting in Britain about immigration and the rise of the
Brexit Party, now the Reform Party.
Of course, in Germany it's very similar.
And in France, you know, and in Italy, every country is dealing
with the issue of immigration in a slightly different way.
And in every country there's a common theme.
And that includes the United States, where you have
communities where immigrants have suddenly arrived in very
large numbers. The feelings against them are
much stronger than they are in big cities like New York or
London or, you know, or Berlin or Paris, where you've always
had a real melting pot of different societies and
different immigrants in different communities.
And it's that sort of rapid arrival, you know, whether it's
a town in the northeast of England or somewhere in the
middle of Kentucky, where people show up suddenly and there's a
quorum of them and they speak a different language and they
worship in a slightly different way.
That is where you have an issue. And I think what I always
thought was true about America, and maybe it's no longer true,
was that America could filter these people coming in, these
outsiders, and say, this is what we're all about as long as you
sign up to that, You know, that a Forbes piece of paper, the
Constitution, which of course everyone's, you know, swears
allegiance to, when they become naturalized, I find that term
extraordinary. Naturalized Americans.
In other words, they become citizens.
You defend the Constitution that defends your right to be
yourself and to be different. That was the key.
And no other country had that recipe for bringing people in.
And I think fundamentally that is now what is at stake across
the board. The big question, though?
Is people have very genuine fears and the reason they do is
because their own lives have become very insecure.
You know, economic affordability is clearly a huge thing here in
the US. The Republicans have actually
won an election in Tennessee overnight, but by a massively
reduced margin than they would have done.
So I think Democrats in this country are quite hopeful that
there may be an answer. But all the world over,
including Keir Starmer in the UK, grappling with how do we
deal with immigration? I mean, just one thing in terms
of a response from the left, I think this kind of focus on
affordability, you know, is their best hope in a way.
I always remember I was talking about speaking to people all
over the country in the UK about immigration.
And I always remember this woman just saying to me, my daughter
hasn't got a school place. My daughter hasn't got a school
place. And it's the immigrants.
It's the immigrants. And I was thinking there's a way
to solve this. Make sure her daughter has a
school place, solve the problems that people are feeling insecure
about. And then you will get less of
this anger and this hatred. But also, it is also, you know,
OK for people to feel angry and upset about immigration and for
us to, you know, talk about how they can deal with that.
What's not OK is to an attack an entire population in the way, as
is happening right now and make people feel just quite so
scared. And that could be politically
interesting because Donald Trump won a lot of votes from Hispanic
voters in the last election. And the early signs and
particularly in those recent elections that we've talked
about in recent weeks where, you know, Zoran Mamdani and others
won against Republicans, is that actually, it does look like
there is a shift away from Trump with those Hispanic voters.
And there was one thing the president said yesterday that I
thought, oh, you've got to be careful saying things like this.
He said affordability is a hoax. And what he meant by that was
people are not feeling, you know, we're, we're solving it
all. People can't afford things.
The broad team, I think. For all this, whether you're
talking about this country or the United States, is that the
big conversation these days is between societies that we want
want to become more closed and those that are still happy to be
open, whether it's to immigration or to trade or to
international institutions. And America, a country that had
always been, for better or for worse, an example of openness,
has done the opposite, battened down the hatches, pulled up the
drawbridge, whether it's on trade or on on immigration or an
engagement with the rest of the planet in international
institutions. That is really, I think for me,
the essence of Trumpism. And, you know, and it's a new
reality that we all have to get used to.
And in various ways, different foreign leaders are trying to
prize those doors open again. But ultimately, the, the, you
know, the, the, the direction is to close them.
But all this annushka is detracting from the, the, the
spirit of the season, which of course, is not just
Thanksgiving, but, you know, you've got Christmas coming up.
I can only imagine looking at the Oval Office, that it'll be
even richer and more, you know, undigestible than it has been on
previous occasions. Yeah.
I mean the the White House. Decorations are quite something.
75 wreaths, 51 Christmas trees, 700 feet of Garland, 2000
strands of light. More than this is a good one.
10,000 butterflies and especially for you Matt. 120
pounds. 10,000 butterflies are these.
Are these chocolate butterflies or real butterflies?
Or Mar a Lago Gold butter? Yeah, this has got.
Question mark question mark question mark on my link can Can
somebody let me know are they real butterflies?
I have to say one of the. One of the great, you know, we
take a lot of spend a lot of time on this podcast talking
about stuff we don't particularly like.
One thing I really, really liked about America and I really miss
is this sort of other customs, the, the traditions.
And you know, I'm not a believer or I'm nominally Christian.
I think that's what it says on my birth certificate.
But I, I go to church to look at some nice windows or art and,
and maybe listen to a bit of music.
But I'm not even remotely religious, but I do get swept up
in that spirit at this time of year.
And of course, it's not all religious.
Some of it is very secular, like Thanksgiving.
But these sort of holidays, they really punctuate an American
calendar. And again, it's so weird that
you have an administration that's prepared to shred all the
things that we've got used to, to tear up the Constitution to
tiny little pieces and challenge all the nostrums and all the
things that many people took for granted.
But at the same time, you still got all these traditions, and
America is sort of baked in in those traditions, even if
they're sometimes involve putting marshmallows on top of
sweet potatoes. That's also a tradition.
That is it. For this week, I do hope that
people are enjoying the show. If they are, they can subscribe,
they can follow. It would be hugely, hugely
appreciated by us if you do that.
You can also use the comments section wherever you watch or
listen to send us comments and we can talk about some of them
on here. We can indeed.
That's all from us. Thanks For me, Matt.
In London, I'm me, Anushka. In Washington, DC, See you next
week. See you next week.