Yeah, we’ll see. Carlson, like Ann Coulter, is a committed nationalist so he finds the prospect of a DREAM deal — especially one that gets nothing meaningful in return — horrifying. Whether most *Trumpists* feel that way, eh. Some do:

Found this by the side of the road … #amnestydon #burnmyMAGAhat pic.twitter.com/QivQ81xClG

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) September 14, 2017

Will most? That’s what we’re all waiting to see. I’m skeptical. Also, there’s a difference between the GOP splintering into equal shares between those who back Trump and those who consider him a sellout and splintering into, oh, say, 95/5 between those who’ll back the president on whatever he wants to do and those who put nationalist principle above loyalty to POTUS.

Carlson can affect the proportions given his perch at Fox, though. Nearly every point he makes here is spot on (I’m less sold than he is that a border wall would be a massive deterrent), especially the one about not allowing a DREAM amnesty to include chain migration. That’s a big deal potentially:

Granting citizenship rights to 700,000 Dreamers really means giving a foothold in the U.S. to perhaps 1.5 million other future immigrants, according to analysts who urged Congress to weigh the implications fully before pressing ahead with a mass legalization program…

“You would expect that each Dreamer or each DACA recipient in the long run would result in around two or three additional people,” said Steven A. Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies.

The case for legalizing DREAMers is that they had no choice in coming to America illegally. They’re blameless. Legalizing their extended families as well, possibly including the parents who broke the law in bringing them here, would be a massive incentive for future would-be illegals to cross the border with kids in tow. Democrats will push for it, for exactly the reasons Carlson gives, but Trump swears that’s a red line:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/908676979561570304

Again, we’ll see. I don’t expect Schumer and Pelosi to drive a hard bargain on chain migration, though, just because they don’t need to. Just as DREAMers themselves can always be granted a path to citizenship later by a Democratic-controlled government once they have legal status, so can their relatives be granted legalization if the current DREAM deal denies it to them. Democrats are playing a long demographic game here. The best defense the GOP has is to try to get something like the RAISE Act on the books; a Democratic administration can always repeal that later too, of course, but uprooting a bedrock piece of immigration policy is harder politically than quietly passing a bill to legalize family members of people who already received legal status from a Republican-controlled government.

POTUS famously believes that his base will stick with him no matter what, a point Mary Katharine Ham summarized memorably yesterday in wondering, “Can he shoot the wall in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it?” He’s probably not too worried yet about defections despite the noise generated yesterday by Coulter, Breitbart, and Carlson. But he’s a *little* worried:

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/908640949605163010
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/908645126146265090
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/908646582807089152
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/908651641943003136

That was quite the tirade on Twitter this morning, ranging from nuking the filibuster to getting “nasty” with jihadis to, uh, ESPN. All of that is red, red meat for his base in different ways. He’s pandering in full spectrum to try to assure them that he’s still one of them, the DREAM deal notwithstanding. The polls next week will be interesting.

.@TuckerCarlson: #Trump Signing Dems' DACA Deal Would Be 'Massive Amnesty,' 'Collapse' of #GOP https://t.co/th4S4pkffP | #Tucker pic.twitter.com/Rhoh0v1XLC

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 15, 2017