Cold Election Day reality

Trump chilled by cold Election Day reality

The Republican will strike a moderate tone on immigration as he searches for a path through the swing states.

By Eli Stokols

When Donald Trump walks on stage here Wednesday, he will be guided by anti-immigration zealots to a more moderate sounding platform, one that represents a pragmatic calculation of his Election Day challenge if not a deeper belief in the unforgiving border policy that won him the Republican nomination.

Conflicting advice from Trump’s remade inner circle of advisers—including former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, newly installed campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and campaign CEO Steve Bannon—and the outside counsel of conservative mega-donor Sheldon Adelson have led to a series of muddled statements that have left Trump sounding at times like President Obama and his former GOP rivals on immigration, not a hardliner ready to deport illegal immigrants.

But over the last week, this coterie of aides, together with speechwriter Stephen Miller, has convinced Trump that some moderation in his rhetoric is undeniably necessary if he aims to compete in swing states on Election Day.

“Trump cannot get the current levels of Latino votes he’s getting in Florida, Colorado and Nevada and win,” one campaign source, speaking privately, acknowledged. “He’s just trying to soften the rhetoric just a little bit. They should have understood sooner the logistical impossibility of what they were saying about mass deportations and the potential political damage, but here we are.”

Bannon, the former Breitbart CEO who has long cheered and defended Trump’s immigration policy, “would never” urge Trump to go soft on the issue, according to a source close to the controversial adviser. “He’s still a bomb-thrower,” said another campaign source. “But he knows that a few things need to be done to win this race.”

According to that source, there is “broad agreement” among the inner circle that winning the election will require Trump to put a more humane gloss on his immigration proposals without significantly watering them down.

Conway, who joined the campaign less than three weeks ago, is an experienced pollster who has spent a lot of time message-testing conservative arguments on immigration. Working for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, now one of Trump’s main allies on Capitol Hill, she presented a template for Republicans in 2014 that called for presenting the issue in economic terms and arguing that immigration is depressing wages for American workers.

In June 2014, she was among several Republican pollsters who offered new research concluding that while a majority of Americans oppose so-called “amnesty” for undocumented immigrants, a majority also “don’t believe ‘deportation’ is a viable policy.

“In fact, there is an overwhelming consensus in support of some kind of legalization for undocumented immigrants,” the report concluded.

In interviews about the speech, Conway has vowed that Trump’s policy will be “fair” and “humane.” But Trump himself has seemed to contradict her suggestions that his policy is at all evolving, while criticizing the media broadly for noticing that it has.

In his remarks Wednesday night, Trump will stick to his “no amnesty” language but stop well short of calling for mass deportations and refusing to consider some extended pathway to legal status for those undocumented immigrants who pay a fine and back taxes. He is expected to emphatically restate his commitment to building a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, aides said Tuesday, beating back suggestions from surrogates that Trump has been speaking metaphorically and planned only to build a “virtual wall.”

And he plans to enumerate his other policy ideas aimed at curbing illegal immigration, from punishing “sanctuary cities” to increasing the number of federal ICE and making E-Verify mandatory, all while explaining the importance of taking these steps for economic and national security reasons.

“It's important that he lay out the 'principles' behind his immigration policy,” said Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster. “He needs to explain why, not just what or how. The public will embrace the details if they embrace the principles. Thus far, he has made declarative statements—but it's not the same.”

Trump will also detour to Mexico before the speech Wednesday, leaving the campaign trail to meet with Mexico’s president to discuss the wall and other border issues. This is not without risk, as President Ernesto Pena Nieto has repeatedly rejected Trump’s assertion that America’s southern neighbor would finance a border wall, and chastised the Republican for his comments about Mexican immigrants.

Trump launched his unlikely presidential bid by broadly painting undocumented immigrants from Mexico as “criminals” and “rapists,” and then surged to the GOP nomination by blasting away at rivals Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz for their alleged openness to “amnesty.” Now, predictably, Trump is struggling to broaden his support and being forced to soften his tone before the election slips away. His speech at the Phoenix Convention Center, delayed a week after the candidate and his team struggled to alight upon a workable position and more mainstream language, now lands as polls show Arizona, a state that’s gone blue just once since 1952, increasingly up for grabs.

In an interview with MSNBC Wednesday, Conway insisted Trump is still firmly opposed to amnesty for undocumented immigrants, but hedged slightly, seemingly excusing her candidate’s apparent waffling by stating that “he also respects it's a complex issue.” The obvious problem is that Trump’s stated views on immigration and the heated rhetoric he used to sell them showed no recognition of those complexities at all. He portrayed several of his primary opponents as weak when they acknowledged the humanity of undocumented immigrants or the implausibility of deporting 11 million of them.

Last August, Trump took issue with Bush’s statement that many undocumented immigrants came to the U.S. as an “act of love,” seeking a better life for their families. “There’s no act of love. It’s tough stuff,” he said at an Aug. 25 press conference. “They’re gonna be gone so fast if I win, your head will spin.” Weeks later during a raucous rally in Dallas, Trump railed against “anchor babies” and vowed to boot undocumented immigrants if elected president. “You people are suffering,” Trump told the Texans. “I’m in New York, but they’re in New York, too. They’re all over the place.”

After a year of such promises that the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants will all “have to go,” Trump expressed personal misgivings about mass deportations and the impact on families during a town hall last week with Sean Hannity.

In a speech in Iowa Saturday, Trump blamed the media for fixating on the deportation issue, one he used to rile up his supporters at countless rallies and that ultimately propelled him through a crowded and competitive Republican primary field, stating that he would “begin swiftly removing criminal illegal immigrants from this country” on his first day in office. The tough rhetoric was an effort to paper over what is a significant departure from the “deport ‘em all” primary rhetoric Trump used for over a year to vanquish his primary rivals, whose slightest openness to allowing undocumented immigrants to stay he cast as “amnesty”—before arriving at their position himself.

“It is very clear from a policy perspective that his proposal to forcibly deport 11 million people was obviously unworkable and has been so ever since it first passed his lips,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster in Washington who worked for Rubio’s presidential campaign. “But it sold well during the primary because people are frustrated with this problem. It’s harder, of course, to sell it now.”

The incongruity, however, is a problem for which there is no easy solution. Many of Trump’s defenders like Ann Coulter effectively shrugged their shoulders over his hedging, asserting that he wasn’t changing his position. Many of his surrogates hit the airwaves to remind the public that their candidate is new to politics. “Some of these issues are very difficult to talk about,” said Jack Kingston, the former Georgia congressman who is now a Trump surrogate, on CNN.

But on Monday, Rush Limbaugh made it plain that, in his view, Trump’s 14-month-long appeal to the immigration zealots among conservative primary voters was little more than a con job.

“I never took [Trump] seriously on this,” Limbaugh told an angry caller who pointed out the hypocrisy of a candidate and his defenders for excoriating critics of Trump’s deportation proposal and now looking the other way when he’s seemingly abandoning it.

“Nuance is antithetical to his brand, so shifts aren’t credible and make him look weak. Because he demagogued on immigration to win the primaries and mocked his opponents who had thoughtful policy positions on immigration, he has no credibility to soften, tweak or moderate his stance,” said Rob Stutzman, a GOP operative in California. “Ironically, he’s hemmed in by the wall of rhetoric he built over the past 18 months and now it’s his cell.”

On Tuesday, Donald Trump, Jr. insisted that gradually deporting some undocumented immigrants starting with those who have broken the law—essentially the Obama administration’s policy already—and leaving the door open to an indefinite number of future deportations doesn’t amount to any softening of his father’s position. “He didn’t change his stance on anything,” Trump, Jr. insisted during an interview with CNN.

To anti-Trump Republicans who long warned of his likely struggles to win over Hispanics and general election swing voters, the candidate’s recent contortions have been as frustrating as they were predictable.

“It's infuriating to watch Trump, who separated himself from rest of field by taking the extraordinary and extreme position on immigration to get to the right of everybody and tapped into a core constituency—and now it just looks like it's going to be more of the same,” said Rick Tyler, who served as a communications adviser to Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign.

“People are starting to mock Donald Trump now. ‘#AmnestyDon’ was trending on Twitter. And this is all self-inflicted,” Tyler said. “This is Donald Trump not having a core governing philosophy to guide him, and not understanding the entire electorate. He oversold all of this, but I'm not sure he even understood what he was selling."