A new stance? A new policy?
Suddenly, Donald Trump is sounding as if he’s softened on illegal immigration.
washington» Donald Trump defeated 16 rivals in the Republican primaries by being the most anti-immigrant of them all, promising to build a giant wall on the border and deport millions. He labeled opponents such as Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio as weak and amnesty-loving, and his extreme rhetoric pushed the entire debate over immigration to the right.
But suddenly Trump sounds like some of the people he defeated. On Fox News’ “Hannity” show Wednesday, Trump talked about how tough it is to break up families for deportation, suggesting upstanding people who’ve been in this country for years should be allowed to stay if they pay back taxes and insisting, just as Bush and Rubio repeatedly were forced to do, that such actions would not amount to “amnesty.”
“Everywhere I go I get the same reaction. They want toughness. They want firmness. They want to obey the law,” Trump said. “But they feel that throwing them out as a whole family when they’ve been here for a long time, it’s a tough thing.”
Meaning murky
As often with Trump, his exact meaning was murky. And it was unclear if he was unveiling a new stance on immigration or simply trying out some new rhetoric to appeal to a general election audience as he lags Democrat Hillary Clinton in polls 11 weeks before the election. His new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, insisted on CNN Thursday morning that “nothing has changed in terms of the policies.”
At a minimum, Trump’s new language seemed to reveal an awareness that his unyielding stance against immigrants is unlikely to get him to the White House, with Latinos voting in great numbers in key states.
“He’s learned painfully, belatedly, that what stirs up a large part of the Republican primary electorate is not what wins general elections,” said John Rowe, a GOP donor planning to vote for libertarian Gary Johnson. “You cannot win without women, Asians, Latinos, African-Americans.”
Criticism
Thursday on ABC, Bush called Trump’s positioning “abhorrent,” saying: “I can only say that whatever his views are this morning, they might change this afternoon, and they were different than they were last night, and they’ll be different tomorrow.”
Clinton dismissed Trump’s shifting language as “a desperate effort to try to land somewhere that isn’t as devastating to his campaign as his comments and his positions have been up until now.”
There were signs Trump risked angering some in the hard-core base that pushed him to the nomination in the first place. Conservative commentator Ann Coulter, who published a book called “In Trump We Trust,” reacted with angry tweets to Trump’s comments on Fox, including remarking sardonically “Well, if it’s ‘hard,’ then never mind.”