Trump’s Pinned to a Wall Few Americans Want
A grand immigration deal may be his only way to end the crisis and deliver to his base.
If President Trump hoped that shutting down the government would rally public support for a wall along the southern border, he must be disappointed. The Washington Post found that Americans continue to oppose the wall, 54% to 42%. Quinnipiac found a similar result, 55% to 43%, virtually unchanged from the pre-shutdown figure.
By a 2-to-1 margin, Quinnipiac reports, Americans reject the tactic of closing the government to force Congress to approve funding for the wall. This is bad news for the president, because Americans overwhelmingly hold him, rather than congressional Democrats, responsible for the shutdown.
The White House’s ultimate weapon—a formal presidential address from the Oval Office—did nothing to shift public sentiment about the wall. Forty-nine percent said Mr. Trump’s speech was “mostly misleading,” compared with 32% who thought it was “mostly accurate.” Only 2% said the speech had changed their minds.
.. Forty-one percent believed a wall would be “consistent with Americans values,” versus 52% who believed it would be inconsistent with them. And strikingly, most Americans reject outright Mr. Trump’s effort to link immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally with a surge in criminal activity: 29% said that these immigrants were more likely to commit crimes than American citizens, compared with 63% who did not. This helps explain why, despite the heated rhetoric of the past decade, 73% of Americans continue to believe that immigration is good for the country.
If I were a Republican senator looking for a way out of this impasse, I would pay careful attention to the public’s views. By 65% to 32%, voters said they would disapprove if the president invoked emergency powers to build a wall. Not even Mr. Trump’s base—whites without college degrees—could stomach that move. Conversely, 61% of voters, including 36% of Republicans and 51% of whites without college degrees, would support a bill that funded additional border-security measures but not a wall.
The fate of Mr. Trump’s gamble on the wall is a microcosm of a larger strategic failure of his presidency—his inability to expand his support beyond the base that brought him victory in 2016 with only 46% of the popular vote. By themselves, Republicans are not close to a majority of the electorate, and neither are conservatives. But opposition to the wall goes well beyond the president’s liberal and Democratic adversaries: 55% of independents disapprove of it, as do 59% of moderates.
Surely the White House is aware of these findings. President Trump seems to have put the emergency-powers option on hold. But he appears to be constrained by the fear that his most fervent supporters will regard a compromise on border security as a betrayal of his most significant campaign promise. A year ago, egged on by Fox News commentators and talk-radio hosts, immigration hard-liners torpedoed Mr. Trump’s tentative support for a package including both wall funding and the Democrats’ priority, legal status for beneficiaries of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
So what happens now? There are three options.
Mr. Trump could stand his ground, gambling that strong support for the wall among Republicans will continue to deter most Republican elected officials from breaking ranks. The downside: If he lost his bet and enough Republicans coalesced with Democrats around a border-security funding bill without the wall, he might cave in or see his veto overridden—ending up as a loser, in his vernacular.
Alternately, ignoring widespread opposition among his opponents and qualms among conservatives, Mr. Trump could choose to invoke emergency powers as the best way of keeping faith with his core supporters. Though litigation would tie up this move immediately, the president would be seen as fighting to keep his promise.
Finally, as Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.) and others have suggested, Congress and the White House could return to the project of broader, “comprehensive” immigration reform. Within a framework along the lines of the 2013 bill, which passed the Senate by a vote of 68 to 32, President Trump could get substantial funding for his wall in exchange for a DACA settlement.
The art of the deal isn’t bludgeoning everyone else into submission; it’s providing them incentives to give you what you value most.