“Trump Proves GOP Proclamations Of Mortal Affront Untrue”: He’s Only Repeating What His Party’s Has Been Saying All Along
In 2006, then-Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce advocated the return of a 1954 program for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. It was called “Operation Wetback.”
In 2010, Sen. David Vitter, Republican from Louisiana, released a campaign ad that depicted a bunch of seedy-looking Mexicans, some with gang bandannas, slipping through a hole in a border fence to invade America.
In 2011, Rep. Mo Brooks, Republican from Alabama, said of undocumented immigrants: “I will do anything short of shooting them” to make them stop “taking jobs from American citizens.”
That same year, Republican presidential contender Herman Cain vowed to build an electrified border fence that would shock Mexicans who sought to slip into the country.
In 2013, Rep. Steve King, Republican from Iowa, said that for every illegal immigrant who becomes a valedictorian, there are another hundred with “calves the size of cantaloupes” because they are drug mules.
Yet the party is shocked and offended by what Donald Trump said? Jeb Bush calls his recent comments on undocumented Mexican immigrants “extraordinarily ugly”? Sen. Marco Rubio finds them “not just offensive and inaccurate, but also divisive”? A major donor tells the Associated Press Trump should be excluded from the debates?
Beg pardon, but there is something rather precious in all this ostentatious umbrage. If you didn’t know better, you might forget that the GOP has sought votes for years by stoking fear and anger toward Mexicans who enter this country illegally. If you weren’t paying attention, you might not know that various Republican officials and pundits routinely characterize those people — most of them just dirt poor and trying to put bread on the table — as a disease-ridden invasion force of drug smugglers and gang members, not to mention pregnant women splashing across the Rio Grande in order to drop so-called “anchor babies” on U.S. soil.
This is not to say Trump’s words were not ugly. They were. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “…They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems [to] us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”
But ugly as it was, Trump’s xenophobia broke no new ground. So you have to wonder at the pious denunciations it is generating. You’re tempted to say people are reacting like this because Trump was blunter than we are used to. On the other hand, there is nothing particularly subtle or ambiguous about threatening to shock Mexicans. Maybe folks weren’t paying attention before.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s comments came as he announced his intention to run for President of the United States, a nation whose last census found about 32 million of us identifying as Mexican-American (some, presumably, good people). Indeed, Mexican-Americans are far and away the largest group under the umbrella rubric “Hispanic.” All the Cuban-, Puerto Rican-, Argentinean-, and Spanish-Americans combined don’t equal the number of Mexican-Americans in this country. So when the GOP talks about “Hispanic” outreach, it is, in a very real sense, talking Mexican-American outreach. Yet this “outreach” seems always to be overshadowed by insult.
The party seems not to realize that you can’t have it both ways, can’t insult people, then ask them to vote for you. How telling is it that, even as party elders assure us his remarks don’t represent the GOP, Trump vaults to second place in the polling of Republican contenders? It’s a truth that gives the lie to these proclamations of mortal affront.
It’s hypocritical and unfair to put all this on Trump. He only repeated what his party’s been saying all along.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, July 8, 2015
“No Room For Misinterpretation”: Donald Trump Warns Of Diseased Immigrants Coming Across The Border—Adds Insult To Injury
This afternoon, future United States President Donald Trump released a statement intended to clarify his remark that illegal immigrants from Mexico are “rapists.”
Trump is unhappy that people are interpreting his statement to mean that he believes all illegal immigrants from Mexico are rapists, when he merely intended to say that some of them are rapists.
Trump, who has publicly speculated that vaccines can cause autism, added that immigrants are responsible for bringing “infectious disease” into America.
Trump’s press release began: “I don’t see how there is any room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation of the statement I made on June 16th during my Presidential announcement speech.”
The speech, he said, was “deliberately distorted” by the media and to prove it he included an excerpt of his remarks so that readers could see for themselves how they have been taken out of context.
“When Mexico (meaning the Mexican Government) send its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you (pointing to the audience). They’re not sending you (pointing again). They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume are good people! But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.”
“What can be simpler or more accurately stated?” Trump asked. “They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc…On the other hand, many fabulous people come in from Mexico and our country is better for it.”
Trump then noted that Mexican cartels bring heroin, cocaine “and other illicit” drugs into America via immigrants, and, “Likewise, tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border. The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world.”
About those vaccines: since at least 2012, Trump has claimed that vaccines and autism are linked.
During a Fox and Friends appearance to promote his cologne, “Success,” in 2012, Trump said, “I’m all for vaccinations, but I think that when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different…” Trump said, adding this was “a theory” but anecdotally, “It happened to somebody that worked for me recently. I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world, and all of a sudden they go in and they get this monster shot. Then all of a sudden the child is different a month later. I strongly believe that’s it.”
So that’s it.
Anyway, in the event that you’ve been slumbering unaware since Trump’s June announcement, his remarks about illegal immigrants have resulted in a mass exodus of businesses in the Trump Inc. orbit. Univision, a Spanish-language TV network, announced they would no longer air Trump’s beauty pageants; Macy’s pulled all Trump branded products; NBC dropped Trump’s show, The Apprentice. Trump has filed suit against Univision, for $500 million, and threatened legal action against NBC.
“I have lost a lot during this Presidential run defending the people of the United States,” Trump said in the Monday statement. “I have always heard that it is very hard for a successful person to run for President.”
Well, now he knows.
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, July 6, 2015
“Donald Trump Is A Complete Lunatic On Immigration”: But He’s No Crazier Than Much Of The GOP
Through the power of his bizarre brand of charisma, Donald Trump has moved from the sideshow to take up residence in the main tent of the GOP circus. And in the process, he’s bringing all kinds of interesting issues to light. Even as he is getting dropped by one corporate partner after another (how America will survive without its Trump-branded mattresses is a mystery), he has moved toward the front of the Republican pack, at least for the moment. And while I’m guessing he’s surprised that the backlash to his remarks on immigration has been so intense, Trump’s repellent views can help us understand the issue and why it divides Americans the way it does.
In case you missed it, during the free-style spoken-word performance that was his announcement speech, Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
In the days since, he has not backed down. While most Republicans haven’t rushed to his defense, he got help from National Review editor Rich Lowry, who wrote in what I guess we could consider a refreshingly candid piece in Politico that “there was a kernel” in Trump’s remarks “that hit on an important truth,” which is that Mexican immigrants “come from a poorly educated country at a time when education is essential to success in an advanced economy.”
As it happens, the truth is that immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, regardless of what Trump or people like Bill O’Reilly might have you believe. But Trump exposes a particular line of thinking that we don’t usually hear from politicians, even as they know it exists and often seek to pander to it in subtle (or not so subtle) ways.
Most of the discussion about immigration is about policy. Are we spending enough on border security? Do we want to build more fences? Can we get the E-Verify system working better? Should undocumented immigrants get a path to citizenship, and how would it work? While all these question are laden with the values we bring to them, they’re essentially practical.
Then there’s the more fundamental question of how we think about immigration, which is where Trump comes in. At its heart, the question is this: Is immigration good or bad?
Pretty much every Democratic politician, and even most Republican ones, would answer that immigration is good. This is a country that was built by successive waves of immigration from all over the world. America is a land blessed in natural resources and with oceans that have kept foreign invasion to a minimum, but the real reason we have led the world in so many areas is that we’re a magnet for immigrants who continually remake the country. Our dynamism — economic, cultural, scientific, and in so many other areas — has always been a product of the fact that we are a society built on constant immigration.
That’s both because of who immigrants are and how they change the nation once they arrive. People who are willing to leave the place, people, and language they know in order to seek out a better life for themselves and their children are always going to be the kinds of people we want. They’re risk-takers, they’re entrepreneurial, they’re hard-working, and they’re willing to defer immediate gains for long-term success. And when you throw people from diverse backgrounds together, you get a country that is always changing, expanding, and progressing, with new foods, new music, new ideas, and new ways of looking at the world.
That’s the pro-immigration perspective. The other perspective fears that they might be criminals, that they’ll drain our resources, and that they’ll make it harder for native-born Americans to find work. And most of all, it doesn’t want our society to change, no matter where its own grandparents may have come from.
You can value immigration and still want to keep it limited, of course. If you asked the Republican candidates to explain their views, this is where almost all of them would say they come down. They want immigration, it just needs to be more tightly controlled.
I have no reason to doubt that this is what they sincerely believe. But they also know that their constituents don’t all feel the same way. Lots of them just want to shut the door.
A Pew poll from last month asked people whether they thought that “Immigrants today are a burden on our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care,” or that “Immigrants today strengthen our country because of their hard work and talents.” Republicans preferred the first statement by 63-27, while Democrats chose the second statement by 62-32.
If that’s an accurate reflection of a fundamental distaste for immigrants — not just undocumented immigrants, but all immigrants — among the Republican electorate, it means the politicians who lead their party aren’t reflecting their views. That’s true even if the policy solutions Republican candidates propose are extremely hard-line.
Then along comes Donald Trump, who is willing to say forthrightly what a lot of people believe, that Mexicans (currently the largest immigrant group) are a bunch of no-good dangerous criminals, and we need to just keep them out, full stop. The fact that so many corporations are treating him like he has the plague shows that it’s one thing to advocate conservative policies on immigration, but rejecting the fundamental premise that immigration is good is something few want to associate themselves with.
But more than a few Republican voters like what they hear. Knowing Trump, he probably won’t stop saying it.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; The Week, July 6, 2015
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