Trump seizing the stage with one idea after another
WASHINGTON — First there was the middle-class tax cut that even his allies and many of his aides had not heard about. Then troops were dispatched to the border to counter an “invasion of our country” by impoverished migrants about 900 miles away.
And then, on Tuesday, President Donald Trump declared that he would sign an executive order essentially rewriting the Constitution as it has been traditionally interpreted to stop children of unauthorized immigrants from automatically becoming citizens just because they are born in the United States, claiming power no other president has asserted.
In the last days before a midterm congressional election that will determine the future of his presidency, Trump seems to be throwing almost anything he can think of against the wall to see what might stick, no matter how untethered from political or legal reality. Frustrated that other topics — like last week’s spate of mail bombs — came to dominate the news, the president has sought to seize back the national stage in the last stretch of the campaign.
Ad hoc though they may be, Trump’s red-meat ideas have come to shape the conversation and, he hopes, will galvanize otherwise complacent conservative voters to turn out Tuesday. But he risks motivating opponents, as well, and he has put even some of his fellow Republicans on the spot as they are forced to take a position on issues they were not expecting to have to address.
Within hours of his promise to end birthright citizenship, some Republicans were denouncing the idea or distancing themselves from it. “Well, you obviously cannot do that,” Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin told WVLK, a radio station in Lexington, Ky. “I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case, the 14th Amendment is pretty clear.”