Then, he vows to get Mexico to foot the bill, as if there were honor in extorting a poor but reasonably amicable neighbor into paying the vital border-security costs of a profligate superpower in whose budget $10 billion barely qualifies as a rounding error. (Compare, e.g., Trump’s promise to do nothing about unsustainable entitlements that are bankrupting the economy.)
.. Yet, absent from most of his speeches to the ardent faithful — and from his campaign’s position paper, with which he seems unacquainted — is the vow he reserves for more progressive audiences and media interviews: He will readmit most of the 11 million illegal aliens (as he puts it, “the good ones”) with legal status after he wastes considerably more than $10 billion to chase down and deport them.
.. Section 326 of the Patriot Act — which expressly targets “international money laundering” and “terrorist financing” — empowers the Treasury Secretary to prescribe rules that financial institutions must follow in identifying people who open accounts and use them to move money. Trump figures all he needs to do is rewrite the relevant regulation.
.. Brazenly, Trump’s memo crows that he does not intend his proposed regulation to be like, you know, a real regulation. It is instead meant to be a scare tactic: hardball to pressure Mexico into coughing up cash for the Great Wall of Trump.
How Donald Trump’s Squeeze on Immigrants Will Backfire
Mexico receives $24.4 billion in remittances from immigrants in the United States, which accounts for about 2 percent of Mexico’s gross domestic product. Indeed, withholding this money may actually encourage immigration to the United States.
42 Trump Takes in 2000 Words
Supporters don’t have to believe Trump will get Mexico to pay for a wall, they can observe he’s building a coalition that is incapable of backtracking towards Hispanics in the general.
.. I do think those anxieties are worse now, but institutional breakdown is also important.
.. The chickens are coming home to roost. Trump is the culmination of three major GOP trends: the bubble mentality where outside opinions aren’t respected, much less engaged, the Southern Strategy of racial resentment, and the embrace of conservative economics. Trump is the symptom here, not the disease
.. Egged on by Fox News and other institutional players, those arguing that President Obama’s agenda was fundamentally radical, a hijacking of government designed to destroy the American way of life, were bound to see this explode in their faces when they then tried to run more respectable candidates.
.. For the past decade, the GOP has been responding that liberals and Democrats don’t have reasonable disagreements, but that they are instead committing treason and trying to destroy the country. If you toss both evidence and civility overboard in your politics, of course someone like Trump will show up
.. It’s also talk radio. If you are reading this, chances are you don’t listen to much conservative talk radio, even though it’s massive, an order of magnitude size larger than whatever “respectable” conservatives you read online. Trump’s scorched earth approach reflects the mindset and worldview talk radio creates much more than the DC consultant class
.. The Republican base doesn’t share elite ideological commitments to entitlement-slashing and low taxes. The Tea Party views these programs not through abstract ideological commitments but in terms of deservedness. That the GOP left 2012 thinking they didn’t need to back off an agenda of more immigration and cutting both taxes and entitlement had them walking right into this mess
.. neoconservatives used to get this. Their bread-and-butter was being for the New Deal but skeptical of the War on Poverty, and they were the perfect intellectuals to guide the Reagan Democrats into the GOP. Yet they quickly fell in line with the movement, trading any thoughts on economic policy to the libertarians in exchange for getting to run the foreign policy
.. ”Movement conservatism is a jobs program. Those who have the jobs in DC are happy. No one else is”
.. It’s also the media too. Their fake “objectivity” and “neutrality” has stopped their role as gatekeepers against an authoritarian political figure (Glenn Greenwald). Their desire for clicks and eyeballs have them giving Trump more coverage and credibility than he ever deserved (Eliana Johnson). Maybe, but the coverage is just as much a demand as a supply phenomenon, and the turnouts Trump is getting is bigger than what could be driven by CNN stories. Also Republicans have spent so much time saying the media is corrupt it’s rich to have them expect the media to bail them out here.
.. By forming a young, multiethnic coalition that is liberal on social issues, Obama has alienated blue-collar Democrats, forcing them into the GOP but the GOP doesn’t know what to do with them, so Trump
How Donald Trump Answers A Question (video: 7 min)
Analysis of patterns in a Donald Trump answer about immigration.