Trump’s latest con
After persistently stiffing everyone from contractors to shareholders and Trump University enrollees, Donald Trump has broken his word to millions of the voters who carried him to improbable triumph in the Republican primaries. Sorry, suckers. The GOP nominee sold a fraudulent bill of goods in vowing, insistently and repeatedly, to rapidly deport 11 million undocumented immigrants. To rousing cheers, Trump scoffed at challengers who said his plan was inhumane and would be impossible to execute.
But now, with new campaign advisers struggling to rescue him from an epic trouncing, Trump has declared that President Obama’s previously reviled immigration policy has been pretty good after all.
From the start of his run for the White House, Trump has pledged not only to build a wall across the U.S.’s southern border, but to rip the 11 million from their homes and communities and send them back from whence they came.
Trump envisioned that a federal “deportation force” would do the dirty work.
“I want to move them out,” he said last July, averring that he would proceed to let “the good ones” back in.
“I will get them out so fast that your head would spin, long before I even can start the wall,” he promised last September, estimating that the process would take “18 months to two years.”
“They have to go,” he said even of so-called Dreamers, young people deemed illegal because they were brought as the minor sons and daughters of undocumented parents.
Even as he laid down the hardest line, Trump savaged as sellouts Republican opponents who contemplated a comprehensive, humane immigration policy.
This wasn’t a few bricks in Trump’s campaign; it was the very foundation.
Flash forward. Ruined by his runaway ego and terrible temperament, Trump finds himself behind in every conceivable swing state, and in some states never considered toss-ups.
He has alienated Hispanic voters, along with independents and moderates in both parties, the vast majority of whom support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Which triggered the betrayal of the Trumpkins. On Fox News Monday night, he championed existing immigration policy, saying, “Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country.”
Rare for a Trump statement, that is entirely true: Obama has removed more illegal immigrants than any other President, more than 400,000 a year.
Problem for Trump is, it only proves how cruelly irrational his own prior promises to radically escalate deportations were.
After praising Obama’s approach, the new Trump pledged Tuesday night, “well, I’m gonna do the same thing,” kicking out “the bad ones” and putting “everybody else” through the same process used by the current President.
Incredibly, he claimed that “you don’t have to put them in a detention center,” adding “I never even heard the term.”
That a man who pledged to remove people from America by the millions claims to be unaware of the current system — whereby hundreds of thousands of immigrants slated for removal are locked up while their cases are adjudicated — is beyond all belief.
For good measure, Trump declared “There could certainly be a softening (in immigration laws) because we’re not looking to hurt people.”
At long last, his fans are meeting the true Trump.
The true Trump who’s perfected the art of the steal; who shamelessly promises the impossible; who, despite glaring gaps in knowledge, thinks he knows more about any given subject than anyone else, who will say anything to make the sale.
Who must never, ever, ever be President.