Why Donald Trump’s Test for Immigrants Won’t Work

Donald Trump proposed an ideological test for immigrants, one that would allow in “only those who we expect to flourish in our country – and to embrace a tolerant American society.” Is it possible to implement a test like that

.. The practical reality is that you are dealing with people who, if they’re fairly sophisticated, are going to almost immediately learn what to say. So unless you intend to tie them to a polygraph, which is a notoriously uncertain device, you’re assuming that you are basically only going to catch the inexperienced or the stupid.

.. more and more extremist organizations are shifting to people who don’t come from a suspect country.

.. What you’re essentially saying is that if somebody is already sophisticated, educated, understands Western values, has money and comes from a country where they have no urgent reason to enter the U.S., they’re probably going to easily slip through. That is very odd criteria for a nation of immigrants. What do we do, change that plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty?

.. in this campaign people keep using ISIS as a term for virtually all terrorism.

.. ISIS is actually a fairly small percentage of global terrorism, and it’s a fairly limited percentage of even Islamist extremist terrorism.

.. It then exploited the fact that Nouri al-Maliki, who came to office during the Bush administration, basically chose to promote both himself and Shiites at the expense of Sunnis in western Iraq and alienated so many of them that when what became ISIS invaded, there was very little resistance.

.. None of this had anything to do with the Obama administration. I think it is unfair to say that it somehow was a product of the Bush administration. The fact is that Saddam Hussein created the divided Iraq where the moment you remove the dictator, all of the divisions became critical.

.. Mr. Trump said that “we should have kept the oil in Iraq.” Could the United States have done that?

Under international law that would’ve been illegal by every possible standard.

You can’t go in to liberate a country and then somehow steal its most important resource. That frankly is not simply illegal under international law, it directly contradicts virtually every value we have as a country.

Trump’s troubles mount

He can be irrational, abusive to underlings, peevish and paranoid. Those closest to him apparently cannot control him, or decline to do so.

.. In short, he’s having a meltdown as his self-image collides with reality

.. he’s a huckster who cannot keep up the image he has been selling to voters for more than a year.

.. He’s on message. And then what did he do shortly after? He went out and decided his talking point for the week would be that [President] Obama founded ISIS,”

.. “He made his surrogates go out and defend it for an entire day. And then he came out a day later saying he was only being sarcastic. He blew his economic speech and then spent three days on the talking point that he then took back as sarcastic

Does It Matter if Ukraine’s Pro-Russian Party Gave Manafort Secret Cash?

Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort from Mr.Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party from 2007 to2012, according to Ukraine’s newly formed National Anti-Corruption Bureau. Investigators assert that the disbursements were part of an illegal off-the-books system whose recipients also included election officials . . .

.. Manafort became, in effect, a general consultant to Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, shaping big-picture messaging, coaching Yanukovych to speak in punchy, American-style sound bites

.. Manafort also insists, “I have never received a single ‘off-the-books cash payment’ as falsely ‘reported’ byThe New York Times, nor have I ever done work for the governments of Ukraine or Russia.” That last part seems like a bit of a dodge. If someone does work for the Democratic National Committee or Obama for America in 2012, does that mean they can say they’ve never done work for the U.S. government? In both cases, they’re answering to the president, and it seems reasonable to conclude their viewpoints and interests align.

.. After years of supporting Ukrainian resistance toRussian threats, the GOP platform suddenly changed this year. We know Manafort’s worldview is considerably friendlier to Vladmir Putin, Russia, and its political allies than the average American foreign policy maker’s. Is this because of secret cash, past contractual work, or Manafort’s personal definition of American interests?

 

Trump and the Republican Dilemma

Two weeks of the candidate’s invective inspired a number of G.O.P. officials to retract their support for his campaign. But where will they go?

But, in the past two weeks, Trump has made things easier for certain Republicans: those elected officials still seeking what Senator Lindsey Graham has called an “off-ramp,” by which they can justify to the most partisan of their constituents and colleagues renouncing the Party’s nominee.
.. And those defections came before Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, North Carolina, that if Hillary Clinton won the election and “gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although, the Second Amendment people—maybe there is.” Suddenly, this was the week when Republicans had to decide whether they would stick by a nominee who, indirectly but unmistakably, had mooted nullifying election results at gunpoint.
.. On Thursday, Trump told CNBC that only the “haters” would think he wanted Hillary Clinton dead. Hate, though, is precisely what he has worked to evoke in his supporters.
.. For some time, commentators have been observing that violence can emerge from the sort of rhetoric that swirls around Trump, and drawing parallels to the angry exchanges in Israel in the days leading up to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, in 1995.
.. By the end of the week, however, none of the remaining forty-eight Senate Republicans had followed her.
.. he did win the nomination. Others have, perhaps without thinking about it much, let a patina of hints about Obama’s citizenship and the undesirability of immigrants and of religious and ethnic minorities build up until it has become hard to tell what the Republican Party looked like without it. And that has made things easy for Donald Trump.