Live from Trumpland: Dara Lind: What the hell is going on with Trump and immigration, explained:
Here is what was supposed to happen: Donald Trump, fresh off a staff shakeup, was going to reboot his flailing campaign by spending a week talking about immigration--the issue that made him the Republican nominee....
He’d hold a quiet, off-the-record meeting with his Hispanic advisory group at Trump Tower... do a town hall... with Sean Hannity... and a friendly, Texan Fox News audience... give a policy speech in Colorado....
Here is what actually happened: The off-the-record meeting didn’t stay off the record.... Attendees told reporters that Trump had promised to support--or at least consider--legalizing unauthorized immigrants. On Sunday, Trump’s campaign chair refused to say whether Trump’s promised deportation force was still a campaign policy.... The Thursday speech got canceled.... Trump himself... he appeared to reject policies he’d already embraced, acting as if he’d never heard them before. He criticized President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback,” which he’d praised in a primary debate. He told the town hall audience it would be “very hard” to deport people who’d been here for decades....
Immigration is the issue that made Trump great again.... It gave him a theory of victory... in November: Voters who felt downwardly mobile and anxious about the future of their country would come out of the woodwork to support a candidate who was strong about protecting them from foreign threats. And in case of defeat, it gave him a possible second act: serving as a movement leader.... Now, all of a sudden, he appears to be poised on the verge of the biggest flip-flop in recent memory....
As we near the end of Trump’s “immigration week,” here is where Donald Trump currently stands on immigration, as far as I can tell: build a wall (and make Mexico pay for it); “extreme vetting” for people who come into the US; unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes should be deported. When it comes to what to do with the 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the US, in other words, Donald Trump is about as vague as he is on other policy issues to which he hasn’t given much thought. But before this week, immigration was exactly the issue he could be trusted to sound like he’d given some thought to. Immigration has been the signature issue of Trump’s campaign from Day One.... After this week, it’s no longer clear whether Trump’s immigration positions as stated on his campaign website are still Trump’s immigration positions....
In the meantime, Trump and his campaign have acted for all the world like they never had a set immigration position at all and are only now really grappling with the hard choices policymaking requires. They haven’t yet pivoted--that would require a new proposal. But in terms Trump would understand, they’ve put a wrecking ball to the building that was on the site and reduced it to rubble.... One aide told the Huffington Post’s Elise Foley this week that Trump had never supported mass deportation at all (which, unless you think that “mass deportation” is just a collection of words that don’t mean anything, is false). Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, when asked on Meet the Press Sunday if Trump still supported the idea of a “deportation force” said it was “TBD.” Trump himself told Sean Hannity during the town hall that it was “very, very hard” to reconcile himself to the idea of deporting someone who’d been in the US for 15 or 20 years....
There’s also the possibility that Trump isn’t just softening his position, but outright flip-flopping--adopting the policies that he mocked, to great effect, when they were being pushed by Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio in the primaries.... [But] to assume that Donald Trump is deliberately referring to a policy proposal because he echoed a phrase associated with it requires, frankly, a higher estimation of Donald Trump’s care with language than this campaign has shown so far....
This goes beyond the Trump campaign’s typical incompetence and incoherence. It makes sense that Trump’s campaign is flailing--that the aide told Elise Foley Trump had never supported mass deportation when he had, or that the hapless Katrina Pierson was reduced to arguing on CNN that her boss “hasn’t changed his position on immigration, he’s changed the words that he is saying.” At this point, incompetence is to be expected from the Trump campaign. But what makes the inconsistency on immigration really disconcerting is what it’s revealing about Trump himself.... He has a disconcerting tendency to agree with whoever he’s talking to: whether that’s Sean Hannity, or a crowd of Trump supporters, or the members of his Hispanic advisory group. Or even a group of young unauthorized immigrants who met with Trump in 2013, asking him to support the DREAM Act. “You’ve convinced me,” Trump reportedly told them....
Trump talks this week like someone who has just started thinking about immigration.... Earlier this week, Trump said he’d “never heard of” detention centers for immigrants, and promised he wouldn’t detain them. That’s how immigrants get deported--they get detained first, then loaded onto planes. If Trump doesn’t understand that, he not only hasn’t read his own immigration white paper--he doesn’t understand the logistical basics of how the government gets an unauthorized immigrant out of the US...
