Here’s my hubris in public: I think the “deportation industrial complex” was supposed to be Trump’s domestic turbocharger. Not just policy, a whole employment ecosystem. You don’t “deport 20–40 million” with a couple press conferences and a stern font.

You need an absurd supply chain: ICE and Border Patrol bodies, transport contracts (buses, planes, fuel), intake and processing, mountains of paperwork, and then the real bottleneck: courts. Judges. Clerks. Translators. Lawyers for the state, lawyers for the defense, lawyers arguing about the lawyers. Plus the physical plant: detention centers, fencing, kitchens, laundry, medical, comms, cameras, generators, and yes, the unglamorous stuff like HVAC techs keeping the boxes habitable.

Add guards, supervisors, auditors, contractors, and the “towns around the prison” effect: diners, gas stations, motels, repair shops, uniform suppliers, bail bonds, you name it.

If that massive internal jobs machine gets jammed up by protests, courts, and ratings that look like a flat tire, my prediction is he pivots to the other reliable accelerant. The thing leaders reach for when the home front won’t cooperate and the economy needs adrenaline: foreign conflict. It’s not even ideological, it’s incentives: unify the base, change the channel, flood the zone, and spin “strength” into a headline.

So yes, I’m calling it: if the domestic turbo fails, we get the rerun. Bomb, bomb, bomb again. I hope I’m wrong. But I’m putting the words here so Future Me can’t pretend I didn’t see the fork in the road.