Trump’s
fluctuating immigration stance worsens Republican tensions
Mixed
messages become Rorschach test for Republicans, who are drifting away
from nominee after week that included vitriolic rally in Phoenix and
Mexico visit
Alan Yuhas
Sunday 4 September
2016 23.58 BST
The ex-mayor of New
York saw “a very big opening” to protect immigrant families and
their American-born children. The governor of Indiana saw “a
roadmap” to deportations and a wall, if not any signposts or
directions. For a senator from Arizona, the whole thing was “just
confusing”.
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Donald Trump’s
mixed messages on immigration, which this week took in a demur speech
in Mexico City and a vitriolic rally in Phoenix, have become a
Rorschach test for Republicans, exacerbating tensions in the party as
several of its leaders drift away from their party’s nominee and
look toward a Democratic presidency. Disappointed by the harsh tone
of Trump’s Phoenix speech, the Republican National Committee
reportedly withheld planned praise.
“He pivots and
then pivots right back,” the Arizona senator Jeff Flake told CBS’s
Face the Nation on Sunday. “So it’s kind of a 360-degree pivot at
times. That’s not clear at all. Some people said it was hardening,
some said softening. I say it was just confusing.”
Flake is one of a
handful of Republican senators who have refused to support Trump,
though he said on Sunday he would like to escape that “uncomfortable”
position and vote for the businessman.
“I’d like to see
a firm position that he sticks with for a while,” he said, “and
obviously I’d like to see a more realistic position in dealing with
those who are here illegally now.”
But Flake also
damned Trump with a hint of praise for his rival, Hillary Clinton,
who has recently urged Republicans to remember that the businessman’s
claims that Mexicans are “rapists” and refugees a “Trojan
horse” of terrorism do not reflect their party.
“For people to be
reminded that this is not what the party stands for I think is a good
thing,” Flake said. “I wish more Republicans would say that as
well. But if Hillary Clinton wants to say it I’m glad – I’m
glad people, voters, are being reminded of it, anyway.”
On Sunday night
Trump responded on Twitter – by bashing Flake. “The Republican
Party needs strong and committed leaders, not weak people such as
Jeff Flake, if it is going to stop illegal immigration,” he said.
Shortly thereafter, he elaborated: Flake, he said, was “a very weak
and ineffective senator”.
In the
realclearpolitics.com poll average for Arizona, which has been won by
a Democratic presidential candidate once in 65 years, Trump leads
Clinton by less than three points. However, a rapidly growing
Hispanic population means the state’s politics are turning steadily
from red to purple, if not yet blue, prompting Clinton to advertise.
In attacking Flake, Trump is unlikely to aid his own Arizonan cause.
Senator John McCain,
Flake’s fellow Arizona senator and the party’s 2008 presidential
nominee, has started running an ad that look toward a hypothetical
Clinton presidency.
“My opponent,
Representative Ann Kirkpatrick, is a good person,” he says in the
ad. “But if Hillary Clinton is elected president, Arizona will need
a senator who will act as a check, not a rubber stamp, on the White
House.”
Trump is
conspicuously absent from the ad: his name unsaid, his image omitted
and his ideas implicitly rejected as McCain tells voters: “We need
more control over our borders but also smarter immigration policies
that enforce the law and reflect our values.”
McCain has not
explicitly rejected Trump, who last year mocked the Vietnam war
veteran for having been captured by the Vietcong, but he has
repeatedly asked the businessman to apologize to other former
prisoners of war. Months of such harsh rhetoric from Trump have
painted Republicans like McCain in a corner, Flake admitted, by
threatening to turn reliably red states like Arizona into swing
states.
“It shouldn’t be
up for grabs,” he said, “but frankly it is.”
‘When America is
safe, we will be open to all of the options’
Even Trump’s most
stalwart allies could not seem to agree about his immigration
message, even though the businessman said in Phoenix: “You can call
it whatever the hell you want. They (undocumented immigrants) are
gone.”
Rudy Giuliani, the
former mayor of New York, told CNN’s State of the Union that Trump
had left “a very big opening for what will happen with the people
that remain here in the United States after the criminals are removed
and after the border is secure”.
“When America is
safe, we will be open to all of the options,” Giuliani said.
According to the former mayor, Trump “would find it very, very
difficult to throw out a family that’s been here for 15 years, and
they have three children, two of whom are citizens. And that is not
the kind of America he wants.”
Trump’s campaign
manager, Kellyanne Conway, told ABC’s This Week through crosstalk
with the host that it was “correct” the businessman would deport
more than just migrants with a criminal record – and then changed
her tone.
“But,” she said,
“no, but he also said that, once you enforce the law, once you get
rid of the criminals, then we’ll see where we are.
“And we don’t
know where we’ll be. We don’t know who will be left. We don’t
know where they live, who they are. That’s the whole point here,
that we’ve actually never tried this.”
The man who would
serve Trump as vice-president, Indiana governor Mike Pence, evaded
any clear answer about his running mate’s position. In an interview
aired Sunday with NBC’s Meet the Press, he said: “What Donald
Trump laid out this week in Arizona was really a roadmap to end
illegal immigration once and for all in this country.”
Pence then rattled
off some of Trump’s ideas, including a wall on the southern border,
targeting people who have overstayed visas and increasing border
patrol staff, but left details for the future.
“We’ll give
consideration, working with the Congress, in a new and reformed
immigration system, to consider it at that time,” he said.
All three said Trump
would prioritize deportations of people with criminal records, the
same strategy Barack Obama has taken during his two terms, during
which record numbers of migrants have been deported and Border Patrol
staffing has reached an all-time high. Obama has also deferred
deportations for several million migrants who came to the US as
children through executive actions that Trump has said he will
rescind.
Giuliani also
conceded the limits of Trump’s shifting deportation plans, which
would eject between 4 and 11 million people and cost an estimated
$50bn. But he and Conway insisted that Trump will somehow force
Mexico to pay for the proposed border wall, even though Mexican
president Enrique Peña Nieto told Trump this week it would not.
Another ally, Trump
transition team member and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, told
CBS: “Donald Trump is going to get rid of, very early on, two to
three million criminals that are here illegally in this country. That
will be priority No1.”
Democrats had their
own interpretations of Trump’s positions on immigration. Labor
Secretary Tom Perez told CNN that Trump was “a loose cannon” and
said his week of Janus-faced speeches “was a perfect illustration
of why he’s not fit to be president”.
In a taped interview
with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, Obama was more stoic, saying
anti-immigrant sentiment could be traced to the founding of the US,
“but that’s not the majority of America”.
“The next
generation of Americans, they utter – completely reject the kinds
of positions that he’s taking,” the president said. “So
overall, I’m optimistic. But, you know, I think we have to pay
close attention to what’s going on.”
Polls suggest that
only some voters were swayed by Trump’s winding week. In a new CBS
poll, 47% of voters in swing states said they saw no change in his
policy, and 37% said they thought he had slightly eased is proposals.
In an ABC poll, 78% thought Trump would fail to make Mexico pay for
any wall, and 67% had a negative to his speech.
Others felt his
Phoenix speech a return to form: former Ku Klux Klan leader David
Duke tweeted “excellent speech by Donald Trump tonight” while
conservative author Ann Coulter compared it favorably to the speeches
of Winston Churchill.
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