The Tory politician Enoch Powell, best known for a notorious anti-immigration speech he delivered in 1968, once wrote, “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.” He might have added that all political infatuations, unless the politician loses, end in betrayal. Both statements are exaggerations—“most” would be truer, if less poetic—but they’re not wrong. A politician’s career generally ends with electoral defeat or, at best, with accomplishments that fall well short of the officeholder’s dreams. A voter’s infatuation with a politician ends when the politician abandons a promise, implied or explicit, and, since every politician must abandon a promise, betrayal is inevitable.
Skilled politicians, however, save failure for late in their careers and betrayal for after the election. Which brings us, no surprise, to Donald Trump, who seems determined to condense both failure and betrayal into a few months and to skip the elective-office part altogether. This week, in an appearance with Sean Hannity on Fox, Trump seemed to do the one thing supporters like Ann Coulter have warned they won’t forgive: endorse amnesty for those who are in the United States illegally. When it comes to deportations, “there could certainly be a softening, because we’re not looking to hurt people,” Trump told Hannity, later adding, “They have to pay taxes.”
Immigration policy is fraught and arcane, and much of the debate relies on code words and catchphrases. The idea of “back taxes” is strongly associated with the amnesty camp (or comprehensive-immigration-reform camp—again, these terms are all loaded), and many immigration hawks took away a clear message: Trump is not serious about immigration. Mark Krikorian of the conservative Center for Immigration Studies accused Trump of “channeling Little Marco and Low-Energy Jeb” and predicted that the “voters who stuck with him through his various antics will start drifting away.”
And they might. But it’s not entirely odd that Trump made these statements. Either he did it because he’s shrewd or he did it because he’s a clown. It makes sense to consider both possibilities.
If Trump was being strategic, then his thinking was probably this: we should debate immigration on the terrain where I’m strongest and my opponent is weakest. All good politicians do this. A few years back, Republican Todd Akin frightened off about 95 percent of the public with comments about “legitimate rape” not leading to pregnancy, all in service of defending an absolutist ban on abortion. Aside from being morally appalling, it was also tactically moronic. Why fight about forcing a rape victim to carry a pregnancy to term (a surefire lost cause that’s miles from the political front lines), rather than about something like, say, late-term abortions, on which the public is much more divided? It’s like allowing the campaign for a $15-an-hour minimum wage (a cause that many people support) to be undermined by a discussion of your desire to abolish all private property and form a communist state. Stake out smarter ground.
Similarly, Trump probably knows that a policy of mass deportation does not enjoy widespread support among the public, and it’s so far from the front lines of immigration policy that there’s no point in dwelling on it. Even immigration hard-liners are muted about mass deportation, with wonkier hawks like Krikorian dismissing it as "Archie-Bunker-screaming-at-the-TV stuff."
Just by sticking to a policy of advocating a wall and promising to deport criminals, Trump is still solidly to the right of current policy but not so far as to frighten off droves of moderates. (For instance, the bipartisan Gang of Eight immigration bill, which was supported by Barack Obama, technically called for 700 miles of security fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border.) That puts Hillary Clinton, who has vowed that anyone who makes it in illegally will be allowed to stay, in a position of weakness, as it is out of sync with the middle. Softening could also have been an attempt to anticipate and fend off accusations made in Clinton’s speech yesterday about the “alternative right”—in which, in effect, she called Trump the political face of white nationalism.
But we must also consider the possibility that Trump was being an oaf. Time and again, he has shown few indications of reading his own position papers. Last February, he defended hiring foreign seasonal workers on the grounds that it was impossible to find U.S. workers—an assertion that contradicted a central premise of his immigration policy, that Americans don’t apply for these jobs because wages are kept too depressed by foreign competition. He has also advocated ugly non-policies, like a ban on Muslims entering the country, that were both cynical and nonsensical, only to rejigger them when some of their many shortcomings finally dawned on Trump as well.
Trump’s supporters think that their man has the right instincts and attitude, meaning he can set large goals and let the policy people put the details in place. The trouble is, even the clearest expression of goals can be undermined by a failure to grasp nuances of policy. Thousands of activists, lawyers, and political opponents are always on hand to sabotage or contest controversial bills—look at all the challenges to Obamacare—and only someone steeped in specifics can understand what’s at stake. Unless you pick one person and just outsource your thinking to him or her, then you’re going to have to weigh a lot of different arguments from your advisers, and that requires your own bedrock of knowledge upon which to evaluate these ideas. Trump lacks that bedrock. Couple that with impulsiveness, and you get one approach on Monday and another on Tuesday.
So those are the two choices: Trump’s latest pivot was shrewd or it was clownish. Granted, a combination may be possible. It can be hard to tell. But the whiffs of betrayal and failure are growing stronger with Trump, while his opponent, despite many flaws, is hitting her stride.
