About-face on Dreamers enrages fans
WASHINGTON— They would stand by and let him get impeached. Or boycott his hotels. Or maybe, a couple of them suggested, they would set their Make America Great Again caps on fire.
Some of the most reliably Trumpian corners of the internet were raging Thursday as if they had signed up for the left-wing resistance.
Just nine days after he had made them so happy, the champion of their anti-immigration fantasies had betrayed them.
In a momentous move that could have major consequences for his political future, U.S. President Donald Trump announced Thursday that he is eager to make a deal with Democrats to protect the so-called Dreamers, the undocumented young people who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
Not only that: he suggested it was ridiculous that anyone would want to deport such upstanding and innocent residents.
“Really!” he wrote incredulously on Twitter.
Not only that: the self-proclaimed master negotiator did not plan to demand funding for his border wall as part of the deal to save the Barack Obama DREAM program (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) he had campaigned on eliminating.
“DACA now and the wall very soon,” he said at the White House after he returned from a visit to hurricane-ravaged Florida.
And not only that: he refused to refer to DACA as “amnesty,” as he did throughout his campaign and his attorney general did last week when he announced Trump was getting rid of it. “The word,” he said, “is DACA.” The details of a possible deal had not yet been hammered out. But it was immediately clear that Trump’s turnabout would be the biggest early test of the loyalty of his base, much of which is hostile to immigration of all kinds.
To some of his staunchest allies, the news smacked of unforgivable abandonment. They had celebrated Trump’s decision to end DACA, thinking he had sent the Dreamers on a path to deportation.
“Amnesty Don,” proclaimed an apoplectic Breitbart, the website run by former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon.
“Why did we have an election,” moaned Mike Cernovich, the proTrump personality who traffics in conspiracy theories.
“At this point, who DOESN’T want Trump impeached?” said far-right writer Ann Coulter, author of the book In Trump We Trust.
“If (Associated Press) is correct,” Iowa Rep. Steve King said when news of the tentative deal first broke, “Trump base is blown up, destroyed, irreparable, and disillusioned beyond repair. No promise is credible.”
Pollsters cautioned that it was far too soon for such proclamations. Trump’s voters have proven to be willing to fall in line behind his own preferences, and not all of them are as hostile to DACA as his most aggressive supporters on Twitter. Polls suggest a firm majority of his voters believe Dreamers should be permitted to stay.
“I can live with it either way, to be perfectly honest with you,” said Carl Hobson, 78, who for months displayed a large Trump sign at his gas station in Maryland.
Hobson thinks Trump should be “damn tough” on illegal immigration, and he complains about tax money going toward services for illegal immigrants. But he said protecting the Dreamers is “the right thing to do.”
“It’s a pretty raw deal to have a kid that’s lived here for several years and then try to throw them away. You can let them stay and let them go through the citizenship process just like the rest of us,” he said.
Larry May, Republican chair in Nolan County, Texas, said he was “not in favour of essentially granting amnesty to the so-called Dreamers,” saying that most of them are adults who “need to be sent back.”
But he said even a bad deal would have a “minimal” impact on Trump voters like himself. He said Trump will remain preferable to people like “communist Bernie Sanders or extreme socialist Hillary Clinton.”
“There’s really not anyone any better. If his supporters are not going to support the communist Democrats, I don’t see they’re going to give up their support just because they disagree with something Trump may have done,” said May, 63, an accountant.
DACA gives 690,000 people twoyear work permits and protection from deportation. It was created by Obama without legislation. A Trump deal could well make the Dreamers far more secure than they are under the Obama program, granting them some sort of lasting legal status.
Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi said she and Trump had come to an “understanding” that the Dreamers would get a path to citizenship.
A Trump spokesperson said he was open to such a path “over a period of time.” But Trump muddied the waters, saying “we’re not looking at citizenship.”
The context for Trump’s shift was especially infuriating to his conservative allies.
He agreed to pursue a deal during a Wednesday dinner with Democratic leaders Pelosi and Chuck Schumer — who was heard saying Thursday, “He likes us. He likes me, anyway.”
Irked with Republican leaders, Trump appeared to be eager to earn another round of the media praise he generated when he cut a budget deal with the Democrats last week.
Dreamers were not ready to celebrate, noting that Trump often changes his mind and that congressional Republicans leaders had not bought in.
The president’s regular shifts in tone and substance have frequently led pundits to wonder whether he is a new man, only to see him revert to the same old.
“This is looking good. But Donald Trump is very unpredictable. I don’t want to get my hopes up,” said DACA recipient Miguel Mendez, 27, an electrical engineer in Texas.