Ask a Donald Trump supporter why they like him, and there’s a good chance they’ll respond that Trump “tells it like it is.” Not for him all the evasions and double-talk you get from those squirrely Washington politicians; you may not agree with him, but he’ll tell you exactly what he thinks.
The truth is that this alleged “telling it like it is” has actually just meant that Trump is willing to say out loud the ugly, bigoted, hateful things many people believe but have been reluctant to utter in polite company. But even when it comes to the central issue on which his presidential campaign is based, Trump can seem almost impossible to pin down, making wildly different statements from one day to the next and shrouding his actual intentions in a fog of confusion.
It’s September, just two months from Election Day, and Trump and his campaign can’t seem to decide exactly what he wants to do about immigration. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that Trump knows what he’s going to do, but then he sends out a wave of surrogates to dissemble and confuse the issue, in the hopes that voters with radically different opinions on this topic will all become convinced that Trump agrees with them. Here’s what happened on the Sunday shows:
Several of Donald Trump’s top campaign advisers and allies on Sunday struggled to explain the Republican presidential nominee’s stance on mass deportation — insisting that he will prioritize undocumented criminals for deportation, but falling short on other details and playing down the scale of his deportation priorities by millions of people.
“After the 2 to 3 million get put out of the country because they’re committing crimes, hurting Americans, selling drugs, doing things that are illegal, once those people are dealt with first — and I think everyone agrees on that issue — then we can deal with the remaining 8 million people,” New Jersey Gov. Christie Christie said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
The number Christie cited both undersold the scale of Trump’s plan and overstated the estimated number of undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes.…
Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, when asked about the plan for undocumented immigrants who are not immediate deportation priorities, said the solution will have to be discussed at a later date.…
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, when asked directly about the other undocumented immigrants, did not provide any additional details during a pre-recorded interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press.”…
Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani took it a step further, saying that Trump’s plan leaves “a very big opening” for dealing with the fate of the millions of non-prioritized undocumented immigrants. He also stressed that he does not believe Trump would want to break up families with undocumented immigrants.
So Trump and his campaign are trying to convince the public that all of the following are simultaneously true:
- America is under siege from millions of criminal undocumented immigrants who are terrorizing our communities and killing our children.
- Donald Trump will send a new deportation force to swiftly and ruthlessly toss these barbarians out of our country.
- Donald Trump isn’t going to be sending some kind of deportation force to start breaking down doors and splitting up families; he’s too compassionate for that.
- Donald Trump is softening his position on immigration.
- Donald Trump is hardening his position on immigration.
There’s no mystery about what’s going on here. We have, on one hand, the true Trump, the one who won the Republican nomination by offering a more extreme version of xenophobic bloodlust than any of the more genteel Washington politicians running against him. This is the Trump who talks unscripted at rallies, feeding off the energy of an angry crowd, validating their ugliest impulses and encouraging them to nurture their fears. That Trump is reflected in the actual details of his immigration policy, under which there will never be any path to any kind of legal status for undocumented immigrants and every last one of them will be deported.
On the other hand, you have the Trump his campaign would like to present to the electorate. They know that the Republican primary voters who gave Trump the nomination are a plurality of a minority, and most Americans disagree with him on this issue, even most Republicans. So they try to portray a different Trump: one who’s going to deport only criminals, one who doesn’t want to break up families, one who’ll get around to addressing the question of the bulk of undocumented immigrants at some unspecified later date, and then who knows?
But that’s not the true Trump. The true Trump isn’t the one sleepily reading a prepared statement someone else has written for him in order to make him sound reasonable. The true Trump is the one whose face reddens, his voice growing gravelly and insistent as he whips his crowds in a frenzy. The true Trump is the one who brings up parents of young people killed by undocumented immigrants on to the stage to tell their stories and testify that if Donald Trump had been president their children would still be alive.
To be clear, these individuals’ suffering and grief is undeniable; what’s ghastly is the way Trump is using them. The fact is that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens. But isn’t it true that if we had no undocumented immigrants, then their children would indeed be alive? Yes, but think of it this way: What if Trump kept bringing up on stage Christian parents whose children had been killed by Jews, or white parents killed by blacks, saying that this is the problem we have to solve? In a country of more than 300 million people, he’d have no trouble finding enough examples. Would anyone deny that the spectacle was a vile incitement to hatred? The message of this stunt, repeated over and over again, is simple: Immigrants should be hated and feared.
If you want to know what Trump really thinks, that’s where to find your answer. Don’t listen to the surrogates trying to convince you that, despite everything he’s said, Trump has a big heart, he cares deeply about families, he wants to construct a policy that’s reasonable and considered and effective. If you think that’s the true Trump, you need to pay closer attention.