“The focus needs to be not on whether an illegal immigrant is a good person or a bad person but how sustainable it is to incentivize illegal immigrants to come over our borders,” Mrs. Palin said.
.. Since the overhaul at the top, Mr. Trump has been relying more on teleprompters at his rallies, making direct appeals to black and Hispanic voters, and moderating his immigration policy.
The Challenge of Rebranding Donald Trump
Talking with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly earlier this week, Trump appeared to be edging toward a deportation policy not much different from the one adopted by the Obama Administration. “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country,” he said. “Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well, I’m going to do the same thing.” Then, speaking to CNN on Thursday night, he backtracked, saying that under a Trump Administration all undocumented immigrants would have to leave the country before applying for legal status.
.. In many rebrandings, there is a tension between the urgent need to change public perceptions of the company and the danger of alienating existing customers and stakeholders.
.. A successful rebranding campaign has to have two elements. It must be surprising enough to attract people’s attention and make them think again about a company or product. And it must be credible.
This exercise never passed the credibility test. In 2005, a BP-owned refinery in Texas blew up, killing twenty-five people; in 2006, a pipeline owned by BP failed in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, spilling hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude; and, in 2010, the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon rig blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in a huge oil spill that threatened the entire Gulf Coast. Six years later, BP is still struggling to recover from a huge hit to its finances and reputation.
.. The “Beyond Petroleum” fiasco proved that you can’t deny who you are.
.. If he’s looking for guidance from the corporate world, Trump could do worse than reading up on the recent history of McDonald’s
.. It was all partly a con, of course. As McDonald’s broadened its menu choices, it still sold huge amounts of unhealthy fried food.
.. McDonald’s turnaround came “not from greater sales of healthy foods but from selling more fast-food basics, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches
.. McDonald’s rebranding was effective because it challenged perceptions of the company without undermining its core value proposition: cheapness and convenience
.. Given how central immigration has been to Trump’s campaign, announcing a more humane approach toward the undocumented could send a forceful signal that he is willing to compromise
.. He’d also need to do some damage control with his base, of course. If he does change tack on deportations, he could also make clear that he still intends to build a wall across the southern border, and to make it much harder for foreigners from other parts of the world, particularly Muslims
.. Kellyanne Conway, the veteran Republican polling expert he brought on as his campaign manager, is reportedly pushing for a U-turn on immigration, and so is Chris Christie.
.. Is he in it to win? Or is his real goal to build up the Trump brand among conservatives and ultra-conservatives, perhaps with the ultimate ambition of launching a media venture?
.. If winning is a secondary concern, it might make more sense to stick with his existing policy and preserve his image as a conservative renegade.
The Trump-Farage Road Show
Farage, who has declared mission accomplished and quit the leadershipof the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party since the Brexit vote in June, is a self-important loudmouth who should be taken seriously. His pomposity masks political guile. His bigotry is attuned to the times.
You can’t have observed Farage over the past couple of years and not think Trump may well win in November. That’s Britain’s lesson to America. There is too much smug Hillary-has-it sentiment swilling around.
.. The thing is, the prosperity was skewed, just as it’s skewed in the United States, leaving wide swathes of the white working class in particular incensed that employment has migrated offshore at the same speed as immigrants have come onshore to take a dwindling number of jobs.
.. Britain, too, has its miniature version of flyover country now. The global citizens of big cities like London and Manchester who voted Remain were aghast that anyone out there in Lincolnshire (let alone a majority nationwide) could think differently, in the same way as the global citizens of New York or Los Angeles can’t see Trump’s appeal to tens of millions of Americans.
.. The uncomfortable truth about the Trump campaign is that, like the Brexit campaign, it is perfectly timed to ride a mood of popular revolt — against neoliberal economics, against the bankers who emerged with impunity from the 2008 financial meltdown, against what Farage called “global corporatism,”
.. Because Hillary Clinton, as a symbol of dynastic entitlement (albeit a female one), is such an easy target for an anti-establishment movement, she is particularly vulnerable to the forces that have produced Trump and Brexit.
.. “One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalization.” The most extreme expressions of this, he noted, were New Labour in Britain and the Democratic Party, led respectively by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton.
How Trump Betrayed Ann Coulter on Immigration
The political commentator may be more committed to the Republican nominee’s platform than he is.
In In Trump We Trust, Coulter calls Trump a “tasteless, publicity-seeking, coarse billionaire” and argues that, “the one thing voters weren’t wild about was his personality.”
Coulter’s ideological interpretation of Trump’s appeal is plausible. It explains, for instance, why support for Trump correlates more strongly to racial resentment than economic misfortune.
.. The secret of Trump’s success, she argues, has been ideological. He recognized that “Americans,” by which she mostly means Republicans, “are homesick.” They don’t just oppose immigration because they believe it depresses wages and strains government services. They’re homesick for a whiter America, an America that was once truly free because “it’s not in the Anglo-Saxon character either to take orders or to give them.” (Never mind about slavery.) Since 1965, however, when Lyndon Johnson signed legislation allowing more immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the United States has been, according to Coulter in In Trump We Trust, overrun by “illiterate peasants … who can be instructed to learn certain symbols and bloc-vote for the Democrats.”
.. Suddenly, Trump is flirting with an immigration policy that resembles that of every other Republican who ran for president. Which makes Coulter look like a dupe.
.. Unlike most of the folks who appear on television supporting Trump, she has an independent brand. And it’s built on white nationalism. Trump may win votes by moderating his stance on immigration. But that’s not how Coulter sells books.
.. Coulter also needs an explanation for Trump’s likely defeat, an explanation that will preserve her ability to claim that America’s silent majority believes the things she does. By emphasizing Trump’s immigration flip-flop, Coulter could argue that this issue cost him the white votes he needed to win.