Thread: Donald Trump Declines to Clarify Contradictory Immigration Positions

Donald Trump Declines to Clarify Contradictory Immigration Positions

• Haley Sweetland Edwards@haleybureau
• Zeke J Miller @ZekeJMiller

11:55 AM ET

"You figure it out!"

(Video at link.)



Donald Trump’s campaign is going out of its way to withhold clarity about the candidate’s shifting positions on immigration, as he appears to be softening his hardline stance on deporting people in the U.S. illegally and banning Muslim visitors.

In interviews this week, Trump suggested that he was no longer committed to forcing the mass deportation of roughly 11 million who have immigrated to the U.S. illegally, a position he has repeated in campaign speeches and debates since August 2015.

He now says he would pursue an immigration policy that would focus only on deporting “bad dudes”—a policy that echoes the enforcement priorities of the Obama administration.

Trump also walked back his oft-repeated promise to impose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” a policy position enshrined in a December 2015 press release. On Saturday, Trump told reporters that he would not ban all Muslim immigrants, but only those from “terror countries.” “I don’t want people coming in—I don’t want people coming in from certain countries,” he told the Daily Mail. “I don’t want people coming in from the terror countries. You have terror countries. I don’t want them, unless they’re very, very strongly vetted.”

Trump did not specify which immigrants would qualify as “bad dudes,” and therefore be subject to deportation. He also would not name any nation that fell under the category of “terror countries,” saying only that “they’re pretty well decided. All you have to do is look.”

When CNN reported Monday that a new campaign immigration policy paper was forthcoming that would soften his stance on the Muslim ban, Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told TIME, “This is not accurate,” and declined to elaborate further. When the Associated Press asked Trump to clarify how he would identify muslims, Trump emailed a statement in response. “You figure it out!” it said in part.

If elected, Trump has promised to wage an “unpredictable” foreign policy, and much of his domestic agenda follows the same maxim. By staking out differing, sometimes opposing positions on the same issue, Trump keeps his opponents and even his own supporters guessing. The lack of clarity stems both from Trump’s own unfamiliarity with some complex policy issues—he fashions himself a big-picture and instinctual leader—but also represents an effort at deliberate ambiguity.

The latest immigration shifts suggest that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is willing to embrace more centrist rhetoric before the general election. But it also marks the latest in a long line of instances in which Trump has dissembled, reversed himself, and walked back previous policy commitments, revealing an increasingly hard-to-pin-down platform just weeks ahead of the Republican convention in July. Trump appears to be betting that the confusion will allow him to appeal to all sides, while allowing him an out should the temperature of any one proposal get too hot.

In recent months, Trump has also appeared willing to negotiate on his long-standing plan, the cornerstone of his presidential run, to build a wall, paid for by Mexico, along the southern border of the U.S. In campaign speeches during the primary season, Trump often described the wall, popular among the Republican base, as bigger, taller, and more “beautiful” in each telling. But in recent interviews, it appears to be shrinking in size and grandeur, as polls show Republican voters in the general election are less enthusiastic about the wall than many primary voters.

“Everything’s negotiable,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity in March. “I’ll be honest with you. You know, I’ll make the wall two feet shorter, or something.”

Trump’s dissembling on immigration, which has been one of the most solid planks of his platform, reflects a broader trend in his campaign in which he has repeatedly committed to a policy and then, in the matter of weeks or even hours, distanced himself from that it, while arguing that he has not, in fact, shifted positions. On March 3, for example, Trump embraced the idea of forcing U.S. military officers to employ torture methods, like waterboarding, that are widely seen as violating international treaties, and he repeated his position that “torture works.”

“We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding,” he said.

Then, a day later, on March 4, he released a statement saying that he would not, in fact, ask military officers to break international laws of war, but simultaneously appeared to remain committed to his previous statements. “I’m in total support of waterboarding. It has to be within the law, but I have to expand the law,” he said. “I’ll work on it with the generals.”

Trump performed a similar two-step after promising to authorize the military to “take out” family members of terrorists. “We’re fighting a very politically correct war,” he said in December 2015. “And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. They, they care about their lives. Don’t kid yourself. But they say they don’t care about their lives.

You have to take out their families.” Three months later, in an interview on CNN, he said he didn’t mean that the military would kill terrorists’ families—only that he would “go after them.”

Trump’s policy platform again changed over the issue of abortion, when he suggested in an MSNBC town hall event on March 30 that women who get abortions should be subject to “some sort of punishment.” Hours later, he released a statement reversing himself: only the doctor who performs an abortion should be subject to punishment, he wrote, not the woman herself. But then he added that his “position has not changed.”

It’s common for politicians to change their rhetoric between the blustery primary season and the more staid and centrist general election. “Pivoting” from more radical policies to more inclusive ones is a tried-and-true move in the dark arts of politics. But most of Trump’s shape-shifting policy positions aren’t exactly “pivots.” Trump doesn’t move between positions on a linear spectrum so much he layers different responses atop one another, embracing a vast pallet of colorful language. The result is a muddled canvas of opinions, where so many competing colors are represented that both supporters and the campaign itself can point out whichever shade fits the mood of the moment.

The problem is that, less than three weeks before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, many voters aren’t certain where their presumptive nominee stands on everything from immigration and foreign policy to trade and the national debt. Even many Republican party leaders have been left uncertain about how to interpret the nominee’s latest terms of art.

http://time.com/4384038/donald-trump...ting-policies/

“You figure it out!”

This is not a response. This is a candidate who has 180'd his position in deporting all illegal immigrants. I can understand the backpedaling on the ban on Muslims, but the this other stuff needs clarification by the campaign or the candidate because quite frankly without it, Trump the candidate has no greater appeal to me than some of the other candidates that he beat with this campaign promise. Good luck with the Chinese on trade because they finance most of our short-term spending. Where do you think the money comes from to run the government after all tax revenues have been collected, the $500B trade deficit with the Chinese converts to T-bill purchases to fund the deficit. This will be the next tree to fall.

Trump has attacked all the other candidates that supported amnesty and quite frankly he is repositioning his campaign now to appeal to more voters for a general election. Hope the Trumpeteers are not too disappointed, but this was all too inevitable.

I know I want the bad guys out and the wall built, but allowing 11M illegals to stay uncontested....that is just amnesty to me. Wishful thinking is out the door for me. His main appeal to me has always been confronting this huge problem and I guess I was just binary when it came to Trump. The deportation and handling of illegal immigration was the "1". I will continue to wait for clarification, but I think the writing is on the wall.

Originally Posted by joe s

This is not a response. This is a candidate who has 180'd his position in deporting all illegal immigrants. I can understand the backpedaling on the ban on Muslims, but the this other stuff needs clarification by the campaign or the candidate because quite frankly without it, Trump the candidate has no greater appeal to me than some of the other candidates that he beat with this campaign promise. Good luck with the Chinese on trade because they finance most of our short-term spending. Where do you think the money comes from to run the government after all tax revenues have been collected, the $500B trade deficit with the Chinese converts to T-bill purchases to fund the deficit. This will be the next tree to fall.

Trump has attacked all the other candidates that supported amnesty and quite frankly he is repositioning his campaign now to appeal to more voters for a general election. Hope the Trumpeteers are not too disappointed, but this was all too inevitable.

I know I want the bad guys out and the wall built, but allowing 11M illegals to stay uncontested....that is just amnesty to me. Wishful thinking is out the door for me. His main appeal to me has always been confronting this huge problem and I guess I was just binary when it came to Trump. The deportation and handling of illegal immigration was the "1". I will continue to wait for clarification, but I think the writing is on the wall.

I hear what you're saying and share some of your concerns. If you'll recall, before Trump won, I regularly shared my concerns with the frequency at which he flopped around. Early on he was going to deport all the illegals but let the good ones back in. Then he was saying something about a merit-system that would allow those deserving the opportunity to remain. Then he was going to deport all the illegals within two years. Now it seems we've come full circle, but instead of deporting them all and allowing the good ones to return, we're just going to actively pursue the "bad dudes". Honestly, I'm just not sure of his exact position (never really was). However, the people chose him, so I humbly gave up on my candidate of choice and went with the winner. Only time will tell if we'll have buyers remorse. In the end though, Trump is really the only option we're left with. I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best.

Hopefully, when it's all said and done, Sen. Sessions will have an instrumental part in Trump's administration and keep him pointed in the right direction. Although, some of the VP candidates I'm hearing about aren't exactly given me a warm and fuzzy.

Got it! It is so tough to figure this out. Your favorite candidate had a reasonable plan based on the law. Does this put Trump with the other 16 republican candidates minus Cruz?

More wishful thinking from the amnesty crowd.

That wasn't from the amnesty crowd, that was from his (Trumps) campaign, but we will eventually see.