Trump says deportations were too tough and hurt him during the midterms

President Donald Trump conceded that his immigration policies were “too tough,” saying in an interview on CBS’ “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday that mass deportations hurt him during the midterm elections.Trump said his policies had been overly harsh in removing undocumented immigrants who hadn’t committed crimes.“I get hurt because we also took people that had good jobs, that created one violation, or breaking of the law, and that was that they came into the country illegally,” Trump said in the interview, which was recorded Friday.He added that “a large group of people” think immigrants who are “good people, working in a landscaping company or working in a hotel or doing something ...

and, in some cases, paying taxes,” should be “allowed to stay.”Trump pointed to immigration as one of the areas in which he wanted to work with Democrats, saying yes when he was asked whether a deal could look like the creation of legal status for undocumented workers.He said, however, that people “on the sort of pretty far right ...would like everybody taken out,” saying some of them were in his administration.

Trump on Friday promoted Stephen Miller, who conceived of the mass deportation policy enacted since Trump returned to office, to White House chief of staff, replacing Susie Wiles.Trump also blamed “bad messaging” for Republicans’ crushing midterm losses last week and downplayed the Iran war’s impact on economic woes.“I think it was bad messaging, maybe by me, but I would talk about it all the time,” Trump said, adding that the media did not cover “positive news for me.

So I have to do it myself.I have to get it out there.”Pressed by CBS News’ Ross Douthat about what the “bad message” was, Trump said, “We couldn’t get the word across.”The White House has mostly been without a press secretary since late August, after Karoline Leavitt left the administration.

Katie Zacharia briefly replaced Leavitt, but she left after...