“Sinvergüenza”: Trump, Bush Don’t Care That ‘Anchor Baby’ Isn’t ‘Politically Correct’
The idea that pregnant women are crossing the Mexican border in droves in an effort to make their babies American citizens is mostly untrue, so it’s fitting that this week’s debate over the so-called problem has already morphed into a less substantial dispute over the term “anchor babies.” Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, and several other GOP candidates used the term this week, prompting objections from those who say it’s a slur. “Children are widely seen as innocent and pure … yet there is an unspoken racial element there, for children of color are all too often pictured as criminals or welfare cheats in training,” Ian Haney López, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, told NBC News.
Unsurprisingly, the man who kicked off his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists has no problem with the term. At a press conference on Wednesday, Donald Trump snapped at a reporter who said it’s offensive. “You mean it’s not politically correct, and yet everybody uses it?” he said. “I’ll use the word ‘anchor baby.'”
Also unsurprisingly, Bobby Jindal was quick to side with Trump in the controversy du jour. He told Fox News on Thursday that people are “too politically correct” and “too easily offended,” adding, “The real issue here — yeah, I’m happy to use the term — but the reality is the real issue here is we need to secure our border.”
Jeb Bush also doubled down on his decision to take a slightly more Trump-esque tone. On Thursday, Bush got testy when a reporter asked if he regrets referring to “anchor babies” in a radio interview on Wednesday. “No, I didn’t. I don’t! I don’t, regret it!” Bush said. “Do you have a better term? You give me a better term and I’ll use it. Don’t yell at me behind my ear, though.” He dismissed the suggested phrase “children born of undocumented immigrants in the U.S.” as too clunky and noted that he merely said they’re “commonly referred to” as “anchor babies.” “I didn’t use it as my own language,” Bush said.
“From the depths of my heart, I look at someone like Jeb Bush, who really should know better and that all I can think of is the Spanish term, sinvergüenza, which means somebody who is completely without shame to attack children this way,” Representative Linda Sanchez, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told NBC News.
As the New York Times recently noted, “anchor baby” isn’t the only derogatory term making a comeback in the 2016 race. During the 2013 immigration debate there was a push for media outlets and politicians to stop using the “I-word,” yet there was a question about “illegals” in the first GOP debate, and the preferred term “undocumented immigrants” has not caught on with Republicans.
Still, not everyone is embracing “anchor baby.” When asked about the issue in a CNBC interview published Thursday, Marco Rubio took the opportunity to show he’s more compassionate than his rivals on the immigration issue. “Well, these are 13 million — those are human beings,” he said. “And ultimately, they are people. They are not just statistics. They are human beings with stories.”
By: Margaret Hartmann, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, August 21, 2015
“The Risk Of Looking Like A Loser”: Why Trump Will Never Make The Ballot
Making political predictions rarely turns out well, but here’s one: Donald Trump will not be a candidate for president in 2016.
What? Yes, I know, he’s already announced. In my view, though, he won’t take this all the way to the ballot in Iowa, New Hampshire, or any of the Republican caucus or primary elections.
Why? Because he’s Donald Trump and everything we know about him tells us he won’t do it.
Let’s step back from the Trump frenzy and consider the realities of a possible Trump run. First is the essential question: Will Donald Trump be the next president of the United States? No. Be it in the throes of a dot-com boom or tulip mania, there are always those who argue, “This time it’s different.” But it never is. All that we know about politics has not evaporated because Donald Trump says he’d like to be president.
What Donald Trump has done so far in 2015 is totally in character with the Trump who’s been in the public eye for decades. He’s a loud voice with strong opinions and loves to be in the middle of the action. But actually putting his name on a ballot would be a strange and quixotic move.
In the Trump lexicon, the greatest insult is to call someone a “loser.” Why would 69-year-old Donald Trump voluntarily transition from business success to political loser? In The Apprentice, Trump decides who is hired and who is, famously, “fired.” He loves that role and it defines his public image. But if he actually takes this quest to a ballot, it will be the voters of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada—all those primary states—who will be interviewing Donald Trump and deciding if he should be hired or fired.
If he doesn’t win, he was fired. He didn’t get the job. Why would he put himself in that position? Short of shaving his head and showing up for a debate dressed in Lululemon yoga pants, it’s difficult to imagine anything more out of character.
When Trump argues that his net worth is far greater than the $3 billion calculated by Forbes and others, he is placing billons of dollars of value on the Trump “brand.” He is obsessed with his image and his brand and that obsession has helped him grow businesses and make a ton of money. Now imagine the likelihood he will risk coming in behind Jeb Bush, a guy who, in Trump’s eyes, might as well be wearing a fake Rolex. Really? How about getting fewer votes than Mike Huckabee? Both of which are likely.
Adults rarely change, and no one changes over 65. Look at Hillary Clinton. She’s the same Hillary Clinton, only more so. And so is Donald Trump. He enjoys doing what he enjoys and God love him for it.
But what do we know about running for president? It’s the most unpleasant, demeaning, debilitating process in public life, a process that almost always ends in failure. Donald Trump is going to put himself through a year of this meat grinder?
Please. That’s absurd.
Some might argue that he can rewrite the rules and force the process to change. No. No one has and no one can. The process of electing a president is the same for all candidates. It’s like the NFL. You can come in a high draft pick or a free agent walk-on, but once the selection begins, no favors are granted.
To date, Donald Trump has benefited from not being taken seriously. The reality is that the majority of negative political stories originate in some form of research conducted by opposition forces: the famous “oppo dumps.” No one has bothered to do serious oppo research on Donald Trump, and for good reason. The Democrats hope he will win—God, do they ever—and no Republican candidates have had the interest or bandwidth to do the work.
But if Trump actually goes on the ballot, that will change. Then we will start to find out basic information that to date has not been part of the discussion.
Voters will learn how often Donald Trump votes, and whether he votes in Republican or Democratic primaries. Does he harbor wealth off shore? What possible legal issues and lawsuits has he been involved in over the course of his career? And that’s just the beginning. Will Trump be able to dismiss questions about his past as relevant to his performance as president? Hard to imagine from a man who questioned the validity of the president’s birth certificate.
Some Republicans seem to fear Trump’s threat to run as an independent. Don’t. He won’t do it. He’s a very smart businessman who knows the threat gives him more leverage. He has built his entire business career on maximizing leverage. Why in the world should he walk away from a powerful bit of leverage without getting anything in return? That’s not the Trump way. But he’s not self-destructive and would have zero desire to go down in political history as a spoiler.
We’ve seen this before. In April of 2011, he was leading the Republican field with 26 percent, about the same as he is getting now. He didn’t run but the polls proved he had a following and he wanted to play a prominent role in the process. Remember when, in 2011, he was named the moderator at a Newsmax-sponsored debate to be held two days after Christmas? It was sort of a nutty idea—more debates? Christmas?—but he was confident he could force candidates to the stage. It didn’t happen. Mitt Romney politely but firmly turned down the invite and eventually Trump withdrew as moderator. It fizzled.
A few days before the Nevada primary, he endorsed Romney and, as a prominent businessman in a local community, it probably helped, just as dozens of other like endorsements were positive. Some speculated that he had demanded a speaking slot at the convention in exchange for the endorsement. Nope, never happened, and he didn’t speak at the convention. Like many others, he helped raise money and did what he could to help the campaign. He didn’t get what he wanted but he handled it well.
Donald Trump is having a great time. He’s raising the profile of issues he cares about and contributing to a national discussion. I call that a good thing in a world in which far too many are apathetic and can’t be bothered to contribute.
It’s not entirely dissimilar to the role a very different sort of candidate named Bernie Sanders is making in the Democratic race. But Bernie has fought many losing public battles and believes there is honor in defeat. Donald Trump believes losing makes you a loser. And he will do anything to avoid that label.
For most candidates, it might make sense to ask, “How could he not move forward without losing face?” but the whole point is that Trump isn’t a normal candidate. He went through none of the usual steps of considering a candidacy—talking to donors, conferring with party leaders, etc.—he just got in because, well, he wanted to. And so it will be when he leaves. He’ll exit when polls still show he can win and forever he will be able to argue he could have won. And in doing so, he will have won by Trump rules.
I don’t think Donald Trump speaks for the Republican Party any more than Al Sharpton spoke for the Democratic Party when he ran for president in 2004. Nor do I agree with many of his opinions, and his tone—often, well, it offends me.
But this is a man who has done many good things. He contributes a ton to charity, pays a fortune in taxes, helps create thousands of jobs. When many were ready to give up on New York City in the bad old days, he stayed, invested, and was rewarded. All of that is admirable and important.
So my advice to the Republican Party would be not to worry about Donald Trump. This will work out and a year from now, the party will be defined much more by the nominee than these pre-season skirmishes. My bet is that Trump will be trying to help a nominee win and will play a positive role.
Of course I also thought Seattle would run. But we will see.
By: Stuart Stevens, The Daily Beast, August 20, 2015
“The Worst-Foot-Forward Problems”: Look Out, Republicans; Donald Trump Is Shaping Policy Now, Too
The moment he officially entered the Republican presidential race, and through the first debate, Donald Trump began to influence (or cheapen, if you prefer) the antics and rhetoric of other candidates.
This wasn’t new or unexpected in presidential politics, let alone Republican presidential politics. But the specter of someone like Trump driving the dynamic—as opposed to a more polished or pragmatic candidate—terrified Republican elites for obvious reasons. Many of them were hoping that 2016 would be the year that Republicans managed to avoid the worst-foot-forward problems that hobbled their nominees in 2008 and 2012, yet here was the GOP frontrunner calling Mexican immigrants rapists, another contender comparing nuclear diplomacy with Nazism, and still another one cooking bacon on the tip of a semi-automatic rifle.
The problem persists to this day, thanks to Trump’s persistent polling advantage and command of the media. But it just got meaningfully worse and now threatens to deteriorate into an outright catastrophe. For the first time since he joined the race several weeks ago, Trump has laid out a comprehensive policy approach—perhaps the most nativist, antagonistic, right wing immigration plan any leading Republican has ever proposed—and it’s earning rave reviews and approving nods from conservatives and other candidates.
Trump isn’t just shaping Republican rhetoric and antics anymore. He’s starting to shape Republican policy as well.
By design, the primary campaign is putting rightward pressure on everyone, forcing viable candidates to stake out positions they’ll ultimately regret, even in realms where Trump isn’t much of a player. At the first debate, both Governor Scott Walker and Senator Marco Rubio claimed to favor abortion bans without rape, incest, and life-of-mother exceptions. But Trump’s foray into policy will make him a standard-bearer in realms like economic and foreign policy, where he has thus far skated by on trash talk and empty sloganeering.
On Monday, Walker said his own immigration ideas are “very similar” to Trump’s—both want a wall built along the U.S.-Mexico border—and his campaign promised, like Trump, to “end the birthright citizenship problem.”
Birthright citizenship is a longstanding right wing bugaboo. It emerged briefly at the zenith of the Tea Party movement, when several leading Republican members of Congress proposed examining remedies to the Constitution’s broad citizenship guarantee. In 2011, Senator Rand Paul proposed amending the constitution “so that a person born in the United States to illegal aliens does not automatically gain citizenship unless at least one parent is a legal citizen, legal immigrant, active member of the Armed Forces or a naturalized legal citizen.”
Neither Walker, nor Trump, has specified how they’d achieve their goals. Trump’s white paper is more consistent with support for a constitutional amendment, while Walker’s comment is more consistent with support for ramping up enforcement so dramatically that unauthorized immigrants are deported before they can give birth. But the details are almost beside the larger point, that as cruel and damaging as the immigration debate was during the last Republican primary, it has become more so this time around. After they lost in 2012, Republicans set about to neutralize immigration as a campaign issue, by moving quickly to the left and helping Democrats update immigration policy for a generation. Instead they have moved significantly to the right.
That reflects a broader, more troubling trend. Three years ago, the GOP recognized the need to move in a subtly but meaningfully different direction. What they’re finding instead is that their coalition lacks the cultural and ideological space to nurture that kind of moderating impulse. Now, as on immigration, Republicans have moved right on a host of other issues, from abortion rights to voting rights. This massive strategic failure by the party apparatus has been investigated at length, and the party’s inability to prevent the 2016 primary from degenerating into another 2012-like fiasco will become the focal point of a thousand postmortems if Republicans lose the presidency again. Their mistake would be to blame it all on Trump, a GOP tourist. The problem runs so much deeper.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 18, 2015
“You Know, The United States Needs More Of This”: In The Race To The Bottom On Immigration, Walker Makes His Move
Over the weekend, Donald Trump became the first Republican presidential candidate to unveil an actual immigration plan. It wasn’t quite what reform proponents were hoping for – Trump’s vision includes mass deportations for roughly 11 million people, a Mexican-built wall, ignoring provisions of the 14th Amendment, and quite possibly deporting U.S. citizens.
If there’s a race to the bottom underway among Republicans battling for anti-immigrant voters, it was a fairly bold move. As Bloomberg Politics reported yesterday, it left one of Trump’s top rivals scrambling to tell conservatives how similar his plan is to the leading GOP candidate.
Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker said Monday his immigration plan is “very similar” to the policy blueprint released Sunday by Donald Trump which amounts to a comprehensive attack on legal and illegal immigration.
“I haven’t looked at all the details of his but the things I’ve heard are very similar to the things I’ve mentioned,” the Wisconsin governor said on Fox & Friends.
Yes, we’ve reached the curious stage of the 2016 cycle at which prominent Republicans boast about how in sync they are with Donald Trump. Last week, it was Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). Yesterday, it was Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).
As viewers of last night’s show know, the degree to which Trump is actually influencing the direction of Republican politics is increasingly difficult to ignore. Sure, that’s to be expected by a White House candidate who’s dominating the race, but given Trump’s clownish reputation, it’s nevertheless striking to see the dynamic unfold before our eyes.
As for the far-right governor, as the day progressed, Walker’s approach to immigration came into sharper focus. He still doesn’t have a detailed plan, per se, but he’s offering more than just “I’m like Trump” on this key issue.
For example, Walker is now the latest national Republican candidate to oppose birthright citizenship – more on this point later today – and he’s on board with mass deportations. So how is this different from Trump? BuzzFeed noted that the Wisconsin governor is eyeing a very different model as a source for inspiration.
Walker repeated his call for a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico on Monday similar to the one separating Israel from Palestinian territories in the West Bank. […]
“I was in Israel earlier this year, they built a 500-mile fence and they have it stacked and it’s lowered terrorist attacks in that region by about 90-plus percent. We need to do the same along our border, we’ve obviously got a bigger border, about four times that, but we’re a country that should be able to hold that,” Walker said while speaking on the Des Moines Register soapbox at the Iowa State Fair.
Let’s not brush past Walker’s point of comparison too quickly. Who looks at the barriers separating Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank and thinks, “You know, the United States needs more of this”?
As for the broader debate, 2012 exit polls suggest Mitt “Self-Deportation” Romney won about 27% of the Latino vote in the last presidential election. Driven by a rabid GOP base, the current crop of Republican candidates seems determined to fare considerably worse in 2016.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 18, 2015
“Republican Race Is Being Led By A Buffoon”: The GOP Primary Is A Mess. Can Anyone Unite This Party?
Jeb Bush is starting to remind me of someone. Tall guy, former governor, worshipped his politician dad? That’s right, I’m talking about Mitt Romney.
It isn’t just the part about their fathers, or the fact that like Romney, Bush is the representative of the “establishment” and doesn’t get a lot of love from the Tea Party base, or even that he seems to share Romney’s propensity for reinforcing his most glaring electoral weaknesses. (Jeb spent much of the last week explaining how the Iraq War was actually a tremendous success and we just need to bring back the Bush Doctrine, which is a great way to win over the many voters pining for a rerun of George W.’s term in office.)
It’s also that Bush’s only path to his party’s nomination may be to duplicate what Romney did successfully in 2012: use his money (and dogged persistence) to hang around while one ridiculous clown of a candidate after another has their momentary flight then crashes ignominiously to the ground, at the end of which primary voters run out of other options and say, “Oh all right, I guess we’ll go with you.”
All things considered, it isn’t such a bad strategy. And given the sourness of the Republican electorate, there may be no other way to win.
If we look beyond the bizarre candidacy of Donald Trump, the 2016 primary race is looking a lot like the 2012 race. While there were some serious people in that one, just as there are in the GOP campaign today, the overall picture voters got was of a chaotic mess in which a bunch of people you couldn’t imagine being president got an undue amount of attention. Just like now, you had candidates who had been elected to Congress but who had no business running for president. You had amateurs whom voters found attractive because they were different than all those blow-dried politicians. And for a long time, no one was able to move into a clear lead.
At this time four years ago, the only candidates in double digits were Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann. Many of that race’s most amusing developments—Bachmann’s demise, the steep rise then fall of Herman Cain, the same for Newt Gingrich—had yet to occur. Today, there are so many GOP candidates, and other than Trump most of them have the support of so few voters, that it looks even fuzzier. Look at the latest Fox News poll, which shows Trump at 25 percent, Ben Carson at 12 percent, Ted Cruz at 10 percent, and Jeb limping in at 9 percent. Three of those four people are never, ever going to be president. A Reuters/Ipsos poll has Trump at 21 percent, Bush at 12 percent, and nobody else over 8 percent.
The GOP race is being led by a buffoon who, despite his appeal to a certain kind of voter, is widely loathed by the public as a whole, barely pretends to understand the first thing about public policy, and still believes that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. Meanwhile, the guys who are supposed to represent the future of the party, like Scott Walker and Marco Rubio, are struggling to hold on to the support of one out of every 15 Republicans or so. To call the race a mess would be too generous.
If the party knew what it wanted, it might be able to settle on a candidate who could give it to them. The problem is that it’s made up of people who want different things. There are sober people who just want to find the candidate who can win them back the White House. But there are many more who know a lot more about what they don’t like than whom they might support. For years now, the Republican Party’s leaders (both politicians and media figures) and its voters have been dancing a manic pas de deux of extremism, where the leaders tell the voters to constantly increase their demands and punish anyone who strays from ideological purity, and the voters respond.
No Republican politician could possibly satisfy everyone in the roiling cauldron of anger, suspicion, and disappointment that is today’s GOP. How do you unite a party when the prevalent theme of their internal debate in recent years has been how disgusted they all are with their own side?
You can’t. But someone is going to be this party’s nominee, and it’s likely to be the one who can keep a steady pace while the others flame out. Jeb Bush recently said, “I’m the tortoise in the race—but I’m a joyful tortoise.” It isn’t much of a plan, but it may be the best anyone has. And there sure isn’t a lot of joy going around among Republicans these days.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, August 16, 2015
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