Trump is Softening on Immigration

/ August 25, 2016 @BrianSchoeneman

There can be no mistaking now that Donald Trump is beginning to soften his rhetoric and policy positions on illegal immigration.  Long his signature issue, since the last campaign shake up, he has moved off the issue considerably, and his public statements on the issue have become so muddled as to be almost incomprehensible.

Trump appears to be finally recognizing that his stances on the issue make him unpopular with a majority of general election voters, even if they were what he needed to win the GOP nomination battle.  And he’s caught in the age-old quagmire for any Presidential candidate – how to soften the tough stances he took to win the nomination without looking like a hypocrite to the voters who got him there.

Last night on Sean Hannity’s show, Trump said this:

“No citizenship. Let me go a step further – they’ll pay back-taxes, they have to pay taxes, there’s no amnesty, as such, there’s no amnesty, but we work with them … Now, everybody agrees we get the bad ones out. But when I go through and I meet thousands and thousands of people on this subject, and I’ve had very strong people come up to me, really great, great people come up to me, and they’ve said, ‘Mr. Trump, I love you, but to take a person who’s been here for 15 or 20 years and throw them and their family out, it’s so tough, Mr. Trump,’ I have it all the time! It’s a very, very hard thing.”

That’s hardly the message he was sending during the primary.  Remember this?

“They say you have to go through a huge legal process. You don’t. They’re illegal. If somebody walks in, they don’t bring them to court, they send them back,” Trump said.

“Well these people came in, and they came in a year ago. No different. If somebody walks from Mexico or wherever they come from, and they come into the country, security guards bring ’em back. You don’t go through 10 years of courts and stuff. Well, this is no different.”

Trump has consistently argued that his immigration plan would require every illegal immigrant who has entered the country to leave and then come back legally.  He’s called for tripling the number of ICE border police, among other things, to deal with the illegal immigrants who are already here.  Now, he’s flip-flopping on his signature issue.

“There certainly could be a softening,” he also told Hannity last night.  That’s probably the last thing that Trump’s alt-right supporters want to see, given that his hard line stance on immigration is what attracted them in the first place.

It’s going to be difficult for the hardcore Trump supporters to ignore this flip-flop, and make no mistake – this is definitely a change from his past stances.  Everybody in the media has picked up on this.  It’s been everywhere, from Fox News to the all of the other channels and news outlets that the average Trump fan hates.

CNN has an article comparing his statements before to his statements now.  CNBC: “Trump steps back from hardline stance on deporting illegal immigrants.” Fox News: “Trump says government can ‘work with’ illegal immigrants.”  Washington Post: “Donald Trump’s slow-motion flip-flop on illegal immigration.”  Associated Press: “In Latest Hedge, Trump Says Immigration Laws Can Be Softened.”

The New York Times, of all places, sums up what is happening right now in a front page from today’s paper: “A Conflicted Donald Trump Tries a New Tactic: Sticking to the Script.”

This tempering of his statements on immigration is giving some former opponents a chance to say “We told you so,” and the first shot came from Jeb Bush.  As reported in this morning’s Politico Playbook, Jeb’s spokeswoman Kristy Campbell said “It is unsurprising that Donald Trump is finally faced with reconciling his immigration policy with reality, something Gov. Bush predicted last year.”

And that’s fair, since the approach Trump suggested on Hannity bears an eerie resemblance to Jeb Bush’s immigration plan.  Trump’s suggestion that they pay “back taxes” and the like is exactly what Bush proposed, where illegal immigrants would have been required to pay back taxes and register, with the end goal of legalization – not citizenship.  Or, to put it the way Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies said:

Essentially, the campaign is staring straight into the face of an epic defeat in November, and the one issue that has caused more problems for Trump with independents, many Republicans, and persuadable Democrats is the illegal immigration issue.  That he’s attempting to pivot isn’t a bad thing – it would be political malpractice not to find a way to soften on this issue, given how absurd his statements on it have been in the past.  The question is whether this will cause heartache for him with his base supporters.

If Twitter is an indication, it already has.

And Ann Coulter started having a meltdown.

To paraphrase Lyndon Johnson, if Trump has lost Ann Coulter on this issue – she literally just released a book entitled “In Trump We Trust” – he’s lost alt-right America. 

It will be interesting to see how Trump’s hardest of the hardcore supporters creatively ignore yet another example of his completely contradicting himself on a signature issue.  I’m sure it will be called a “media lie” that he said these things.  He’ll have been “misunderstood,” his words twisted to mean the opposite of what he actually meant, in their minds.  He’s still the toughest of the tough on illegal immigration, even if he has to pretend to be softening in order to win the election. 

Essentially, his strongest supporters have created a kind of “Trump Taqiyyah Doctrine” where he can lie to the media about what he’ll really do to avoid persecution – and doing so isn’t a political sin, but a virtue.  No matter what he says now, they’ll assert, we know what he really wants to do.  It’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that has been part and parcel of the Trump movement from day one.  It’s amazing that in today’s era of video, cameraphones, instant transcripts and wall-to-wall media coverage that anybody can expect to get away with such blatant waffling, but Trump has done so successfully for over a year now. 

That being said, if there is an issue that Trump can’t afford to back track on, it’s illegal immigration.  It’s left to be seen what impact this will have moving forward. 

Brian W. Schoeneman is the former Editor-in-Chief of Bearing Drift and a featured columnist. 

@BrianSchoeneman
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