I’m grateful to the folks at the Daily Signal for bringing a recent segment of The Will Cain Show to my attention. It’s worth watching:

I appreciate the scope of the conversation and its perfectly civil tone. I would have had no qualms participating in it. I’m not hard to find.

Nevertheless, given the centrality of my remarks to the topic of discussion, I figured it is worth trying to sort out where, in Cain’s estimation, I’ve committed “bad analysis intellectually and politically.”

The disagreement stems from my recent appearance on America’s Newsroom, in which I was critical of Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship on several specific grounds: First, few who are qualified to opine on the subject believe that this is within the president’s authority. Arguments in its favor rely on the notion that it constitutes a bank shot to get the Supreme Court to revisit the issue or compel Congress to clarify its provisions at the margins. Both are uphill battles. Popularizing this cause will consume the administration’s time and resources that could otherwise be committed to more popular and urgent matters. Among them, controlling the population of illegal immigrants, which is one of the president’s foremost mandates. There are opportunity costs to everything we do.

Cain concurred that “most of” my “argument was political,” which would be the grounds on which we might disagree. But Cain pivoted to the merits of the arguments against birthright citizenship. His co-panelist, the Daily Signal’s Rob Bluey, echoed and expanded on Cain’s remarks. “It’s not like this is the first time we’re debating the issue of birthright citizenship,” he observed. Can’t argue with that. We can argue with the conflation of a legal immigration category with illegal immigrants or the notion that changing patterns of assimilation should make us more skeptical of immigration broadly. But to do so would be to engage in the very thing I warned would be necessary: expanding the terms of engagement on the issue of illegal immigration, an argument he’s already won.

Trump’s critiques of Joe Biden’s insane immigration regime already have broad cultural purchase. To expand the category that concerns people — an adult population with no prospects in this country and no legal basis to be here with the infant children of legal but temporary migrants — will commit the president and his servants to a public-relations campaign. And when they’re making that argument, they’re not making others.

Putting the merits of this policy aside, it is just not especially popular, and its legality is in doubt. It’s an inauspicious signal to those who remember when and why the Biden administration went off the rails. Joe Biden secured a limited mandate from voters in 2020, and he was nothing but contemptuous of that fact. In the fatal pursuit of grandeur, he outsourced his administration to wild-eyed activists who, armed with boutique legal theories about how to remake the social contract via executive action and regulatory overreach, frog-marched the president through one political minefield after another. They thought they could muscle their unpopular progressive vision into being, but the system and voters rejected it. There are lessons there if the president is willing to see them.

Cain and company didn’t get around to addressing this element of my analysis, which is odd because it was the majority of my analysis. But my trepidation was not unrepresented on the panel.

Cain’s co-panelist, Vince August, conceded that this EO is likely to fail. Maybe Republicans can salvage a moral victory from it by retailing a plan that is measured in years. But failure is failure, and failure incurs costs. Did Barack Obama emerge stronger — his worldview triumphant — when the courts struck down DAPA? Was Joe Biden’s administration buoyed by face-plant after face-plant before the courts? Has society suddenly embraced punitive vaccine mandates, the abrogation of property owners’ rights, and the societal assumption of student loan debt? Did Donald Trump win more than he lost when the earliest iterations of his travel ban orders hit the skids, unnecessarily galvanizing an organic opposition movement? Of course not.

Toward the end of the segment, my arguments and I dissolved into nebulous abstraction. “That thought process that I hear from Noah feels very yesterday and doesn’t really seem like it has a place in today and tomorrow,” Cain said.

If I sound outdated, that may be because some things are timeless.

Only if you think Donald Trump has repealed the laws of political physics would his administration incur no political penalties from such a strategy. Honeymoons don’t last forever, and there are tradeoffs to everything. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

“I don’t know what their future is in the political dialogue of America,” Cain concluded – lumping me in with a category of conservative commentators – “Never Trump Republicans” – who share Cain’s suspicion that I am irrelevant. They might be right. Regardless, Trump’s triumphs will be short-lived if he becomes convinced that he will defy political gravity. But even though we disagree on this narrow point, I think Cain and his co-panelists would find we agree on more than we disagree. There’s only one way to find out for sure.