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“Already Waist-Deep In Stench”: The Most Corrupt Candidate Ever Is Donald Trump

Before his message was overshadowed by a scandal about his use of a white-supremacist image — a mistake that could happen to any candidate, really, so long as that candidate had inspired a massive following among neo-Nazis — Donald Trump was trying to make a point about Hillary Clinton’s corruption. She is the “most corrupt candidate ever,” he claims. Corruption is indeed a plausible line of attack against Clinton — or, at least, it would be, if the opposing candidate was anybody other than Donald Trump, who may actually be the most corrupt presidential candidate ever.

It should be conceded that the evidence against Clinton is fairly damning. After Bill Clinton left the presidency, the former First Couple intermingled career and personal interests in ways that, at minimum, exposed them to a high risk of contamination. The Clinton Foundation was not only a charitable endeavor but a vehicle for Bill Clinton to enjoy the comforts and exercise the quasi-official power of an active figure on the world stage. Donors to the foundation included many of the same businesses and individuals who paid the Clintons for private speeches, and who had an interest in cultivating close ties with a secretary of State and potential future president. Some of those figures had business interests that aligned with Russian strategic goals rather than American ones. The Clintons failed to promptly disclose all of their foundation donors and, on at least one occasion, appointed an apparently unqualified donor to a State Department board.

The evidence of Clinton corruption is circumstantial rather than direct. If they wanted to stay above reproach, they could have rigorously disclosed every dollar that passed through their personal and professional accounts, and made it plain that neither donating to their foundation nor hiring them for speeches would purchase any special treatment whatsoever — indeed, they bent over backward to demonstrate that they could not be bought. Instead, they profited from the ambiguity.

The case against Hillary Clinton is that her administration might be corrupted around the margins — in its minor appointments or pardons and in the relative ease in which some donors get their calls returned — but that the basic contours of her administration would be a continuation of the non-corrupt center-left program of the Obama administration. The case against Trump is qualitatively different. Trump is flamboyantly corrupt in ways that run to the very core of his identity and prospective governing choices.

This is all the more remarkable given that Trump’s complete lack of experience in public office ought to provide him with the opportunity, which most novice candidates have, for a clean-slate résumé. Instead, he is already waist-deep in stench. Trump has not merely intermingled campaigning with his business interests; the two are one and the same. His entire political career seems to be an outgrowth of his efforts to build his personal brand, which Trump has endlessly used the campaign as a platform to promote. He has devoted speeches to attacking the judge in the fraud suit against his “university,” instructed surrogates to do the same, and promised to relaunch the enterprise if elected. He celebrated the Brexit vote, which drove down the value of the pound, as helpful for driving visitors to his Scottish golf course. This sort of behavior is not an appearance of a conflict of interest but the definition of one.

Trump appears to be genuinely unaware, even at the conceptual level, that his business interests might complicate his ability to govern in the public interest. During the primary, when a debate moderator asked if he would put his holdings in a blind trust, Trump comically replied that he would, while defining a “blind trust” to mean his children would run his business for him, which is the opposite of a blind trust. Even if Trump wanted to distance himself from his business interests, the nature of his holdings would make it virtually impossible, as The Wall Street Journal explains today. A traditionally rich person could place their wealth in third-party hands without knowing what they were invested in; Trump’s business is his personal brand, making divestment impossible. “Trump’s empire would pose unprecedented conflicts of interest due to the size of its holdings, privately held nature of the family-run business, and concentration in one industry,” Richard Painter, the Bush administration’s ethics lawyer, tells the Journal.

Trump’s entire business career reeks, beginning with his early associations with organized crime and proceeding through a career of swindling. “No other candidate for the White House this year has anything close to Trump’s record of repeated social and business dealings with mobsters, swindlers, and other crooks,” reports David Cay Johnston. Trump is not merely comfortable doing business with criminals and thugs — his habits of manipulating bankruptcy laws and swindling his partners have left him reliant upon, let us say, unconventional sources of investment, many of whom are the scum of the Earth. Franklin Foer lays out impressive circumstantial evidence that Trump may well be a puppet of Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump shares a web of financial ties that help explain their shared worldview. Whatever we might think of Clinton, we can be confident she is not controlled by the Kremlin. And the failures of disclosure or record-keeping in her operations pale beside Trump’s defiant refusal to disclose his tax returns.

It is altogether fair to condemn Clinton as a corrupt practitioner of the Washington cash-for-access culture. She and her husband are careless, susceptible to greed — normal politicians, in other words. Trump is the figure whose corruption stands out on a historic scale, and the notion that disdain for corruption would supply a rationale to elect him is nothing short of bizarre.

 

By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, July 5, 2016

July 7, 2016 Posted by | Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Organized Crime | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“A Lot Of People Like Me”: Donald Trump And The Ku Klux Klan: A History

For months, as Donald Trump developed his political repertoire, he adopted an uncharacteristic reply for questions about fascism and the Ku Klux Klan: silence, or something close to it.

He used the technique as early as last August, when his opponents, and the press, still generally regarded him as a summer amusement. On August 26th, Bloomberg Television anchor John Heilemann brought up David Duke, the former Klan Grand Wizard, who had said that Trump was “the best of the lot” in the 2016 campaign. Trump replied that he had no idea who Duke was. Heilemann asked if Trump would repudiate Duke’s endorsement. “Sure,” Trump said, “if that would make you feel better, I would certainly repudiate. I don’t know anything about him.” Changing tack, Heilemann pressed Trump about an article in this magazine, which described Trump’s broad support among neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other members of the far right who were drawn in by his comments about Mexicans. Trump maintained a posture of indifference. “Honestly, John, I’d have to read the story. A lot of people like me.” The interview moved on to other topics.

It should be noted that Trump’s unfamiliarity with Duke is a recent condition. In 2000, Trump issued a statement that he was no longer considering a run for President with the backing of the Reform Party, partly because it “now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke.”

Throughout last fall and into the winter, Trump continued to accumulate support among white nationalists. In November, on a weekend in which he said that a black protester, at a rally in Alabama, deserved to be “roughed up,” Trump retweeted a graphic composed of false racist statistics on crime; the graphic, it was discovered, originated from a neo-Nazi account that used as its profile image a variation on the swastika. In January, he retweeted the account “@WhiteGenocideTM,” which identified its location as “Jewmerica.” Shortly before the Iowa caucuses, a pro-Trump robocall featured several white supremacists, including the author Jared Taylor, who told voters, “We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people.” Each time Trump was asked on Twitter about his white nationalist supporters, the candidate, who is ready to respond, day or night, to critics of his debating style or his golf courses, simply ignored the question.

Only under special circumstances did Trump summon a forceful response on matters of the Klan: in January, BoingBoing unearthed a newspaper report from 1927 on the arraignment of a man with the name and address of Donald Trump’s father; the story was about attendees of a Klan rally who fought with police, though it wasn’t clear from the story why the Trump in the piece was arrested. Asked about it, Donald Trump denied that his father had had any connection to a Klan rally. “It’s a completely false, ridiculous story. He was never there! It never happened. Never took place.”

But recently, as Trump’s campaign has received much belated closer scrutiny, his reliable approach to the Klan problem has faltered. On Thursday, Duke offered his strongest support for the candidate yet, telling radio listeners that a vote for one of Trump’s rivals would be “treason to your heritage.” The next day, when Trump had hoped to focus on his endorsement by Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, a reporter shouted a question about Duke’s embrace, and Trump said, “David Duke endorsed me? O.K., all right, I disavow. O.K.?” For the moment, it worked, and the press conference moved on. Christie, in fact, bore the brunt of the Duke association: he appeared on the front page of the Daily News on Saturday, as the “MAN WITH A KLAN,” with his picture beside a group of hooded Klansmen. In a different spirit, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site that long ago endorsed Trump, awarded Christie the title “Heroic Deputy.” (Christie’s overnight evolution from trashing Trump to obeying him repulsed even the political class, a group that is usually more forgiving of self-rationalization. The technology executive Meg Whitman, who had been one of Christie’s top backers, called his alliance with Trump “an astonishing display of political opportunism,” and asked Christie’s donors and supporters “to reject the governor and Donald Trump outright.”)

Over the weekend, Trump’s purported indifference to support from white supremacists and fascists became an inescapable problem. He had retweeted a Mussolini quote from @ilduce2016 (which, it turned out, was an account created by Gawker to trap Trump)—“It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep”—and, when asked, on NBC, if he wanted to associate himself with Mussolini, he said that he wanted “to be associated with interesting quotes.” He added, “Mussolini was Mussolini. . . . What difference does it make?” On CNN, Jake Tapper pressed him about David Duke, and Trump, seeming to forget that he had given a one-line disavowal, reverted to a position of theatrical incomprehension: “Just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, O.K.?” Tapper asked three times if Trump would denounce the Klan’s support, and each time Trump declined. “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists,” he said. “So I don’t know. I don’t know—did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because I know nothing about David Duke; I know nothing about white supremacists.”

By Monday, less than twenty-four hours before primary voting on Super Tuesday, his non-answers about the Klan were creating a crisis, and Trump introduced a new explanation: audio trouble. “I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece that they gave me, and you could hardly hear what he was saying,” he said on the “Today” show. “But what I heard was various groups, and I don’t mind disavowing anybody, and I disavowed David Duke and I disavowed him the day before at a major news conference, which is surprising because he was at the major news conference, CNN was at the major news conference, and they heard me very easily disavow David Duke.”

There may be no better measure of the depravity of this campaign season than the realization that it’s not clear whether Trump’s overt appreciation for fascism, and his sustained salute to American racists, will have a positive or negative effect on his campaign. For now, his opponents are rejoicing. Marco Rubio, the Florida senator, pronounced him “unelectable.” Governor John Kasich, of Ohio, called Trump’s comments “just horrific.” But it is by now a truism to note that Trump has survived pratfalls that other politicians have not. A surprisingly large portion of Americans believed him when he pushed a racist campaign denying the birthplace of Barack Obama; a comparably chilling portion of Americans were attracted when he called Mexicans rapists. By the end of the day on Sunday, he had received the endorsement of Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama, the first sitting senator to officially line up with Trump. Sessions was not likely to be bothered by Trump’s flirtations with the Klan. In 1986, he was rejected from a federal judgeship after saying that he thought the Klan was “O.K. until I learned they smoked pot.”

In the weeks to come, Trump is virtually guaranteed to accumulate additional endorsements from politicians like Christie and Sessions, who have divined their interests in drafting behind the strongest candidate for the Republican nomination. Whether driven by fear of irrelevance, or attracted by the special benefits of being an early adopter, Christie seemed compelled to do it, and now the remnant of his political reputation is going from a solid to a gas. But the true obscenity of his decision, and those of other Trumpists, may take years to be fully appreciated. In an editorial last week, the Washington Post declared that “history will not look kindly on GOP leaders who fail to do everything in their power to prevent a bullying demagogue from becoming their standard-bearer.” That’s true, but history will judge even more harshly those who stand with Trump now that it is indefensibly clear with whom they are standing.

 

By: Evan Osnos, The New Yorker, February 29, 2016

March 2, 2016 Posted by | Donald Trump, Ku Klux Klan, White Supremacists | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“In The Murky Depths Of The Internet”: Trolls And Nazis Mourn Trump Loss

To Donald Trump’s seedy Internet fan club, he’s some sort of god. So when the final numbers were tallied in the Iowa caucus on Monday night, no one was more upset than the online trolls.

Trump’s Internet forum star-status is fueled by white supremacists and Neo-Nazis as well as the kind of snarky nihilists that lurk on 4chan. Stormfront, a website dedicated to providing a “voice to the new embattled White minority,” has touted Trump as a beacon of hope in months past, politically aligning itself with other white nationalists who recorded robocalls for Trump in Iowa.

Between posts discussing the best images from the Third Reich and theories about Hillary Clinton’s bowel issues, Stormfront had difficulty emotionally comprehending Trump’s loss, especially given the robocalls recorded in the state by the leader of the White Nationalist American Freedom Party. Some chalked up Cruz’s win to an elaborate conspiracy to keep Trump from becoming the president.

“This has probably been rigged in favor of Cruz, by elitists behind the scenes who fear they won’t be able to control a President Trump,” user GreyWolf1972 wrote.

Others surmised that the uptick in support for Rubio, who ended up a close third in the final tally, was orchestrated by undercover Democrats on a mission to bring Trump down.

“How many Hispanic Democrats switched to Republican party in Iowa tonight to vote on Latino anchor baby Marco Rubio?” Diet_Cokeaholic wondered.

These fervent Trump bootlickers can only imagine that a conspiracy must have foiled their golden-haired idol. He is the only person who validates their nationalism, the one man who suggests their ideas might not always be confined to the darkest corners of the Web. Now that Rubio may be the candidate to beat, they really hate his guts.

“On the CNN the Jews and the Negro Van Dindoo are making even less sense,” wrote user piltene. “Marco Rubio like a little shark smiling and bragging now.”

Instead of spouting epithet-ridden laments, 4chan reacted to the loss as if their pet died.

A “Trump Support Group Thread” emerged moments after word of his loss to Ted Cruz spread around the internet. “TRUMP IS GOING TO GET REKT INTO 3RD ITS ALL OVER,” someone further down on the thread wrote. Another thread, which featured an image of an angry Ron Jeremy, read in all caps: “IOWA DOES NOT DECIDE THE REPUBLICAN.” The first commenter so desperately wanted to agree but you could tell he was worried.

“Faggot, we know that,” he wrote. “Trump needs 2ND PLACE though. 3rd place or lower, and every MSM will start ramming their dicks onscreen for a month straight trying to slay the god-emperor.”

4chan is the website where users have invested hours into crafting elaborate memes of the candidate they either ironically or seriously or somewhere in the middle, refer to as “dank.” In one instance Trump manually retweeted a video called “You Can’t Stump the Trump (Volume 4)” to the uproarious delight of every basement-dweller in the forum. This is their unlikely hero and on Monday night, he let them down.

Yet at least one person speculated that this loss was intentional and that Trump was creating a distraction for everyone to get a leg up as the race continues.

“Gotta lull your opponents into a false sense of security, and the media will do exactly that,” wrote user IMFUCKINGZYZZBRAH. “For Trump, for free. We accept defeat for this battle, but not for the war.”

In the conspiracy wing of the Internet, there was still hope for a brighter future.

“It’s what they expected—a narrow loss,” InfoWars radio host and paranoia proliferator Alex Jones said in an audio message to The Daily Beast. He has touted Trump’s nationalist appeal on his show in the past, even having the GOP frontrunner on for an interview in between ads about DNA-altering supplements. “Then he goes on to dominate New Hampshire and other states. He was advised not to campaign there,” Jones said referring to Iowa. “That’s what’s going on. The evangelicals—some of them just couldn’t vote for Trump.”

For the fringe arm of the cultish and conspiratorial Internet, anyone who is not Trump is a waste of space, often a meaningless minority or extension of the Jewish powers that be.

In this snake pit, Trump is king. But on Monday night, he got a dent in his crown.

 

By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, February 2, 2016

February 3, 2016 Posted by | Donald Trump, Iowa Caucuses, White Supremacists | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Reawakening To Save The White Race”: White Supremacists Or Donald Trump: ‘The Positions Made Me A Convert’

William Daniel Johnson is a practicing lawyer in Los Angeles.

He’s 54 years old with neatly styled silver hair and a kind of authoritatively quiet voice. He also serves as chairman of the American Freedom Party, a white nationalist group he co-founded. And he absolutely loves Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump isn’t governed by handlers,” Johnson told me over the phone from his law office. “He shoots from the hip and he speaks forthrightly. He does not care what public opinion is.”

Johnson, who requested that he not be referred to as a neo-Nazi in this article, is listed under the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Extremist Files,” notably for proposing a 1985 constitutional amendment that would have revoked the American citizenship of every non-white inhabitant of the United States

“No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race,” the language of the amendment read. “Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.”

In Johnson’s words, the United States is facing a threat to “the continued existence of Western civilization,” with immigrants displacing whites throughout the world. The only person who seems equipped to ensure that the white race can thrive at the top once again is a golden-haired real estate magnate by the name of Trump.

“I was not a supporter of the man until the positions made me a convert,” Johnson said, describing how he was swayed by Trump’s promises of a wall separating the United States and Mexico and a new plan to ban all Muslims from entering the country. For the quarter of a century during which Johnson was aware of Trump before these proposals, he wasn’t a huge fan. Now, he said, “I admire what he’s doing very much.”

Still, Johnson doesn’t want to hear Trump—despite his strong leadership skills and penchant for xenophobia—compared to Adolf Hitler. “We eschew any reference to Adolf Hitler,” he said.

The slight problem for Johnson, in his political capacity, is that the American Freedom Party has its own presidential candidate. The portly, blue-eyed Bob Whitaker is the party’s man. He campaigns with the catchy slogan “Diversity Is a Codeword for Genocide.” Yet as Johnson laughingly told The Daily Beast, Whitaker himself supports what Trump is doing, as do many members of the party.

Indeed, interest in the American Freedom Party has surged along with Trump’s rise, Johnson said.

“We have seen a dramatic uptick in support,” he crowed. “In fact, sometimes I can hardly manage because of this Trump phenomenon.”

He thinks this is a major turning point in American history, that white men are experiencing a reawakening upon finding a candidate who is not as effeminate and fearful as the country’s previous leaders.

“The white men in America have been beaten down over the last 50 years by anti-white propaganda,” Johnson explained. Referring to Trump’s recent proposition to ban Muslim entry to the United States, Johnson said, “That will go down in history as a major turning point. When I was a teenager and saw the antiwar movement, I think we are seeing an equal turning point right now.”

Trump’s political message has rung true with a number of white nationalists, who feel that immigration and the influence of Islam are curtailing their freedom and economic opportunity. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, they say, are leaving the country unsafe with a leader who is not fit to protect Americans.

Former KKK leader David Duke spoke highly of Trump’s immigration plans in August. Forums on Stormfront, a white supremacist organization, lit up like the phone lines of a radio station giving out free concert tickets after Trump proposed his recent idea.

“Seeing all the top politicians in Britain come out in full fury in defense of the enemy is sickening,” one user wrote of foreign politicians’ disdain for Trump’s rhetoric. “Islam and Europe are mortal enemies and have been for 1400 years during which they have tried and almost succeeded in conquering us many times but were beaten back at the last minute!”

“Yuuup, The Don is on a roll,” another chimed in, referring to their red hat-wearing hero. “More whites will wake up.”

Johnson seems to think, and hope for, the same thing. For his group, which requires all members to be heterosexuals of “complete European Christian ancestry,” Trump is a mainstream mouthpiece for what are often deemed publicly unsavory ideas.

The GOP frontrunner, after all, retweeted a racially biased false crime statistic generated by an individual who identifies as a neo-Nazi. People of color have been kicked out of his rallies—called the n-word and “monkeys” when they have spoken up against Trump’s racially hostile language.

And he’s awoken a sleeping giant, according to Johnson.

“A few years ago, the people that would come out and be forthright about supporting the white race and the Western civilization, they would just be beaten down,” he said. Now, he claims, he gets calls from the white student union at an Ivy League university, asking him for a way to get their message out there effectively.

“The fact is that this has started only since Trump has taken his position that he’s not backing off from,” Johnson said.

Still, the American Freedom Party chairman describes his relationship with Trump as “unrequited love.” He said he has contributed financially to the campaign, created a super PAC to support him, and tries to get the message out about Trump’s near sainthood on the party’s daily radio shows.

Trump’s campaign did not respond to The Daily Beast when asked if he would consider giving Johnson a position in a future Trump administration. At this point, Johnson said the idea of playing any official role for his future president would just be “wishful thinking.”

“I would do it, but it would be unlikely that I would be approved by the Senate,” he said. But he’s not actively courting any kind of role. “We’re doing this because we want to save Western civilization and the white race.”

Johnson made it seem like a great majority of the American Freedom Party—which he founded alongside Kevin McDonald, an anti-Semitic professor who thinks Jews are genetically programmed to try to out-compete others for resources—is on board with supporting Trump. But the party itself will not allow me to attend its meetings.

“Sorry, but most meetings are not open to the public, and members don’t want to be demeaned by curious media,” an unnamed representative of the party said.

Somewhat in jest, he told me to wait six months before I try to get into one of the group’s get-togethers. Its New York office is nothing but a P.O. box, according to Johnson, as many members of the party work out of their homes. But given Trump’s steady climb over the past six months, it doesn’t seem far-fetched to suggest he’ll still be around in the next six.

Some 65 percent of likely Republican primary voters said in a recent Bloomberg poll that they supported Trump’s Muslim ban. Just 24 percent of his supporters in North Carolina think Islam should be legal in the United States. And from the rallies to Stormfront forums to the mouth of Johnson, the sentiment is not that Trump is doing too much. It’s that he’s not doing enough.

“I’d want him to focus on all immigration, whether it’s illegal or legal,” Johnson said.

Upon hearing that under President Trump, no Muslims, legal or otherwise, would be allowed entry, he replied, “OK, good.”

 

By: Gideon Resnick, The Dailly Beast, Decembet 10, 2015

December 11, 2015 Posted by | Citizenship, Donald Trump, White Nationalists, White Supremacists | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

“Trump’s ‘Operation Wetback’ Delusion”: No, Donald, Most Americans Want Something Very Simple; It’s Called Immigration Reform

I don’t know about you, but I think it says something interesting that in the eight presidential campaigns I’ve covered and written about, this is the first time I’ve seen the need to weave The Daily Stormer into my normal news diet.

But how could one not, with Donald Trump still walking among us? The neo-Nazi Stormer has loved The Donald ever since the famous Mexican rapists speech, so when Trump invoked Dwight Eisenhower last night as the last president who understood how to get those people out of the country, I knew immediately which trusted news source I wanted to go to first.

James Kirkpatrick’s write-up did not disappoint. He opened his dispatch with the complaint (legitimate, it must be said) that Marco Rubio has now walked off the stage of four debates without having been asked to utter a word about his immigration reform support of 2012. When he turned to Trump, the Stormer correspondent first sniffed about the candidate’s “usual lack of polish.”

There followed a string of Trump criticisms, but then came the bolt of thunder: “But none of that matters as Trump stood strong even while being aggressively pressed on immigration… This represents a milestone in the immigration debate. At a stroke, Trump demolished the argument that deporting illegals is not feasible. The only question now is whether we have the will to do it.”

By now, you’ve read all about how Trump was referring, albeit not by name, to Operation Wetback, the program undertaken by the Eisenhower administration in conjunction with the Mexican government to send workers who’d come to America illegally back to the home country. Mexico wanted them back because it was then an under-industrialized country that needed all of its able-bodied men.

This isn’t the first time Trump has mentioned Operation Wetback without mentioning it. He did it on 60 Minutes back in September. At the time, the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice put out a white paper explaining what Operation Wetback was and what bringing it back would mean. The long and short of it was that we quite simply rounded people up and sent them back at gunpoint. It was ugly business. In the summer of 1955, hundreds of Mexicans we’d sent back got left in the high desert to die.

Would we really do something like that today? No, we wouldn’t. Those were different times. Eisenhower’s attorney general was a fellow named Herbert Brownell. A Nebraska native who went East to Yale Law and practiced at Lord Day & Lord in New York, Brownell was a cultivated man and, as far as I knew until recently, a supporter of civil rights who endorsed Ike’s move to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. But with respect to the “wetbacks,” Brownell endorsed shooting a few border crossers on site to send a message to the rest of them. I don’t think even Trump’s AG would say something like that.

But the main point isn’t even that we wouldn’t do it today. The main point is that we couldn’t even if we had a president who wanted to. In the 1950s, most of the Mexicans in the United States illegally, in fact virtually all of them, were single males (or maybe married men, but alone) who came here to work. So they were solo players. And they were typically located in only a handful of places—Los Angeles, San Francisco, some other cities, the border area itself.

Today, undocumented immigrants are every kind of person, and they live everywhere. “It’s not like today you’re talking about some easily identifiable group of mostly single men,” Frank Sharry of America’s Voice told me Wednesday. “It’s all kinds of people fully integrated into American life.”

The average time living in the United States among the 11.3 or so million here without papers, says Sharry, is 13 years. They’ve put down roots. One third are homeowners! They’re fathers, mothers, grandparents. And many or even most families involved here are what they call “mixed status”: maybe the husband has a green card, the wife doesn’t, two kids came over the border with them, but two other kids were born here and are citizens. What do you do with these people? The United States of America is going to start breaking up loving families? What I do mean start? We’ve done it. It wasn’t one of our more glorious chapters. It was called slavery.

It’s a practical impossibility. And that’s to say nothing of the mountains of lawsuits that would quickly pile up. Oh, and also public opinion, which strongly supports legalization over deportation. Sharry says the ratio is about four-to-one among the general public, but that even among Republicans, it’s 60 percent for legalization, 20 percent who would prefer deportation but don’t think it’s practical, and the remaining 20 percent who are over in the Trump-Stormer corner.

No, Donald, most Americans want something very simple and straightforward. It’s called immigration reform. With a path to citizenship for people who follow the new rules. That’s what America wants, but that’s what America cannot get, because of the yahoo right wing and because of cowards and milksops like Marco Rubio, who are even worse. At least the yahoos are straightforward in their stupidity and hatred. Rubio, who first tried to ride immigration reform to the White House and is now trying to ride opposition to same to the identical destination, should be made to answer for it. On this, at least, the Stormer correspondent and I agree.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 11, 2015

November 12, 2015 Posted by | Donald Trump, Immigration Reform, Marco Rubio | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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