The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 13 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

We’ve now learned that Donald Trump will appoint Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy, and has picked Tom Homan, his former head of ICE, as his new “border czar.” South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem will be Trump’s Homeland Security secretary. That’s a trio of anti-immigrant hard-liners, and these choices suggest that Trump is very much going to act on his threat to carry out mass deportations. Paul Krugman of The New York Times has a great new column arguing that these mass deportations, if carried out, will cause a large spike in inflation and produce other terrible consequences. How will Trump voters react to that? How will Trump himself try to make it all disappear? Today, we’re talking to Paul Krugman about all this. Great to have you back on, Paul.

Paul Krugman: Great to be back on, if not the circumstances.

Sargent: Indeed. Stephen Miller will be high up in the White House, and he’s the primary architect of Trump’s agenda of mass deportations, carried out with giant camps and possibly the military. Tom Homan, the incoming “border czar,” has confirmed that mass deportations will be attempted. You wrote that this could have a catastrophic effect on grocery prices in addition to other prices. Can you talk about all that?

Krugman: Yeah. There’s a lot that people don’t understand about the role of immigrants in the U.S. economy. It is something like maybe 8 million undocumented workers in the United States, something like 5 percent of the workforce. You say, OK, that would be pretty bad if we lose that, but how bad could it be? And the answer is that they are not evenly distributed. There are certain occupations that are really very heavily immigrant, certain jobs that are very heavily filled by immigrants, many of them undocumented. Those include in particular ... top of the list would be food. Agricultural workers, about three quarters are immigrants and probably about half of them are undocumented. Meat packing is probably between 30 and 50 percent undocumented immigrants. So the whole food supply chain is reliant on people who are going to be rounded up and put in camps.

Sargent: That seems like a problem when you describe it that way. I’ve got to think that Trump voters in particular could very well feel these impacts very acutely. They’re getting scammed here, aren’t they? What’s the impact going to be on so-called Trump country?

Krugman: Grocery prices are a real flash point. Affluent Americans spend a relatively small share of their budget on food, but less affluent spend a lot on food. Most people have no idea—how does that stuff get to your table? What’s the process by which food gets grown and processed and sent to supermarkets? People have very low information about all of this and they have no idea that what sounds like a good thing, Let’s get rid of these illegal immigrants and give the jobs to Americans—well, it ain’t going to work that way or isn’t going to work smoothly. And it’s going to be a pretty big shock to people’s cost of living and the way they live.

What we learned from this election is that lots of people have very low information about, first of all, what Trump was proposing, and secondly, what it means. I’ve been seeing now repeated focus groups after the election with Trump voters who are shocked to find out that tariffs are taxes. And they’ve been deliberately misinformed by Trump people. Vance keeps on saying that all the jobs are going to immigrants and if we can get rid of the immigrants, those will be more jobs for Americans. That workforce isn’t there. We have essentially full employment among native-born Americans. There is no reserve of Americans to take these jobs, by and large jobs that native-born Americans would be very reluctant to take. People have absolutely no idea—a quorum of people who voted in this election have absolutely no idea of what’s coming down the pike.

Sargent: There’s no doubt about it. To return to a point you raised earlier, one of the central tenets of Trumpism and MAGA is this zero-sum assertion that if immigrants are working here, they must be taking jobs from Americans. We’ve been through a recovery that proves the direct opposite, but that didn’t appear to sink in for a lot of people. I’ve got think that if deportations do cause major disruptions, there’s at least a chance the American people reconsider the zero-sum mindset on a fundamental level; maybe come to understand that it isn’t just addition and subtraction—immigrants here means no jobs for Americans—that they complement each other, that immigrants help the economy, that they’re in large part responsible for our........

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