Rope-a-dope

Trump's immigration rope-a-dope

After diplomatic turn in Mexico, a fiery immigration speech proves the GOP nominee's moderation to be a ruse.

By Eli Stokols

After playing at diplomacy in Mexico following two weeks of muddled messaging on his signature issue, Donald Trump shed any pretense of a softer message or general election “pivot” with a declaration of his fealty to the hardline positions and inflammatory rhetoric that propelled him to the Republican nomination.

Trump’s surprising trip to the presidential residence in Mexico City on Wednesday afternoon, which created a moment for him to stand side by side with an elected head of state and declare sovereign nations’ rights to protect their people, amounted to a well-executed bit of campaign stagecraft by the GOP nominee who, after a year of demonizing Mexico and its people, managed to strike a far more diplomatic turn—for him, anyway—on the international stage.

“I happen to have a tremendous feeling for Mexican-Americans,” Trump said, eschewing the usual vitriol as he stood before a dark marble wall that evoked speeches by foreign leaders at the United Nations.

Having ditched his traveling press corps, Trump’s lie that he and President Enrique Pena Nieto didn’t discuss who would pay for his border wall wasn’t exposed until the Mexican president tweeted that they had a few hours later. And minutes after he stepped onto another stage here Wednesday night and began to speak to his raucous supporters, it was even more clear that the sojourn across the southern border, much like his campaign's two-weeks of gentle walkbacks, was a ruse—that Trump and his campaign had used Pena Nieto as a prop in an opening act that served only to set up an evening stem-winder. The farce was, in hindsight, clear even before Trump approached the mic, as two of his warm-up speakers, Rudy Giuliani and Jeff Sessions, donned Trump hats that read “Make Mexico Great Again too.”

Time after time, the crowd of more than 5,000 people, clad in red Trump hats and waving campaign signs, erupted unprompted into chants of “Build the wall!” and “Lock her up!”

In the Arizona desert, hours after he spoke of his affinity for the Mexican people and the shared priorities of the two neighboring countries, Trump railed for nearly 90 minutes about the many ways undocumented immigrants are hurting the country and harming Americans. He promised not just to build a border wall, but also to empower a massive new “deportation force” of ICE agents to round them up.

“You can call it deported if you want. The press doesn’t like that term,” Trump said. “You can call it whatever the hell you want. They’re gone.”

He reverted to the tough talk he was unable to muster on foreign soil just hours earlier about Mexico paying for the wall. Toward the end of his speech, he used the personal anecdotes of mothers whose children were killed by undocumented immigrants to further demonize “illegals.” He blamed the deaths of “countless Americans” on President Obama and Hillary Clinton and their immigration policies.

A senior Clinton campaign adviser acknowledged that Trump’s daring Mexico gambit seemed effective and thus worrisome for a few hours Wednesday—until his speech a few hours later. “Not worried anymore,” the adviser said. “The Nuremberg speech put all that statesman-like stuff away.”

Rather than issuing a statement criticizing the speech, Clinton’s campaign sent reporters a collection of tweets cheering it—from noted white supremacists like David Duke and conservative provocateur Ann Coulter.

For weeks, Trump had dithered on the issue that has defined his candidacy from the start, suggesting that the question of what to do with the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country was more difficult than he’d heretofore suggested as he vowed to send them all home. Kellyanne Conway, his newly hired campaign manager, praised his newfound recognition of the issue’s complexity; and his inner circle of advisers grappled with how to better sell Trump’s tough policies to a general election audience.

Ultimately, however, Trump was seemingly attempting to sell a slightly softened position on deportations to the base that voted for him in the primaries largely because of it. Trump’s revived bombast and the 10-pronged list of immigration policy ideas were actually a clumsy effort to obscure the fact that he is no longer vowing to immediately deport every undocumented immigrant in the country illegally (just as many as possible in a more gradual manner starting with two million with criminal records).

“They’re going out fast,” he said. “Moving forward, we will issue detainers for illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime whatsoever and they will be placed into immediate removal proceedings, if we even have to do that.

“We will terminate the Obama administration’s deadly, and it is deadly, non-enforcement policies that allow thousands of criminal aliens to freely roam our streets, walk around, do whatever they want to do—crime all over the place. That’s over. That’s over, folks. That’s over.”

But in trying so hard to present his proposals as a hardening of his position, he’s unlikely to accomplish the only real imperative of any policy speech given 69 days from an election—winning over unconverted general election voters. And the amped-up nativism and Trump’s proposal to even curb legal immigration are likely to only harden the two blocs of ardently pro-Trump and never-Trump monoliths on opposite poles of this election.

The irony in Trump’s pre-Labor Day base play is that many of his supporters don’t need harsher rhetoric or unwavering policy positions to turn out for him in November. Many, in fact, don’t take his promises of deporting all undocumented immigrants or forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall all that literally.

“He’s never going to be able to get 11 million people out of the country,” said Steve Hagely, a Trump supporter from Tuscon standing near the back of the crowd inside the cavernous, concrete-floored convention center. “It’s just something he says.”While loud screams and cheers answered Trump’s promise of a border wall, some supporters aren’t convinced that will actually happen either. “How’s he going to really get them to pay for it?” said Brian Howe of Phoenix. “I think what he’s saying is that America’s not going to get taken advantage of anymore.”

While loud screams and cheers answered Trump’s promise of a border wall, some supporters aren’t convinced that will actually happen either. “How’s he going to really get them to pay for it?” said Brian Howe of Phoenix. “I think what he’s saying is that America’s not going to get taken advantage of anymore.”

Trump spent his speech Wednesday night addressing those already converted to his cause, forgetting how easily most of them will forgive whatever small touches of moderation might creep into an otherwise hawkish policy platform.

“I think he’s just trying to win,” said Drew Hathcock, from Surprise. “The people who are already with him, he’s not going to ever lose them. He’s trying to get more. He needs more. The base isn’t big enough for him to win with just them.”

Unfortunately, Trump's speech appears to be narrowing his support even more, driving away some of the prominent Hispanic Americans who had willingly taken part in the GOP nominee's recent "roundtables" that in hindsight seem more like hollow photo-ops.

Immediately following the Arizona speech, Jacob Monty, a member of Trump’s newly formed National Hispanic Advisory Council, resigned, and Alfonso Aguilar, the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, said in an interview that he is “inclined” to pull his support.

“I was a strong supporter of Donald Trump when I believed he was going to address the immigration problem realistically and compassionately,” said Monty, a Houston attorney who has aggressively made the case for Trump. “What I heard today was not realistic and not compassionate.”

Aguilar, the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, was once a Trump critic who earlier this summer set aside his qualms about Trump’s rhetoric toward Hispanic people, and organized a letter of support signed by himself and other prominent Latino conservatives. Since then, he has repeatedly defended Trump in media appearances, as has Monty.

“It’s so disappointing because we feel we took a chance, a very risky chance,” Aguilar said. “We decided to make a big U-turn to see if we could make him change. We thought we were moving in the right direction…we’re disappointed. We feel misled.”