Trump's big day on immigration: What an actor he is.

What an actor Trump is.  In one day he posed as presidential in his press conference after meeting with the Mexican president Wednesday, August 31,  and in the evening he delivered a speech in Arizona with red meat dripping in hate fueling tones that whipped the crowd into a frenzy. There was  no “pivot”. The kinder, gentler Trump had disappeared.  Even some of his Hispanic advisors distanced  themselves by the next morning, expressing their “disappointment” and “being misled”.

Once again he repeated his battle cry of “build the wall and pledged he would still make Mexico pay for it.  He ignored the subsequent tweet from the Mexican president that he had told him Mexico would not pay for it.  Trump differed from the president saying the pay issue was never discussed.   That is no minor embarrassment.

To bolster his heated rhetoric, he made assertions that were based on many falsehoods and exaggerations per Associated Press fact checkers.   Some measures he proposed were already US policy and being implemented with such vigor that Pres. Obama had received the title from Hispanic critics as “deporter in chief”. What was new was that Trump would form a deportation task force by tripling ICE agent numbers and increasing border patrol personnel, using local police to finger illegal immigrant criminals hiding out.  Unnoted by Trump  it would also require convincing  Congress to pass laws regarding his  proposal of  withholding federal aid to  “sanctuary cities” first to force and  free local police cooperation with ICE..

To justify his earlier assertions that the illegal immigrants were murderers and rapists, he paraded a dozen or so parents of victims of those who were murdered and raped by illegal criminals who escaped deportation if having been found guilty of prior crimes. Fact checkers had already knocked holes into the figures of crime increases, but he ignored or exaggerated the statistics.   As the Associated Press fact checker reported, most of those caught had been released by Court order, not by Obama or Clinton’s lenient policies.  That “problem” of due process would still exist if Trump were president.

Tough talk against any form of “amnesty” or providing a pathway to legalization, was another way of saying: “no softening”.  He simply placed the nine million illegals who did not commit crimes as lower priority for deportation and in limbo since he promised he would come up with “humanitarian” policies after his other deportation and build the wall proposals had been completed. Critical humanitarian and legal concerns such as breaking up families, deporting even US  citizen children,,  and passing laws against birthright citizenship were ignored or dismissed out of hand as not  as important.  If illegals wanted legal status to avoid deportation, he said, they would have to go back to their country of origin and apply.  This was not a matter of "standing in line", but Trump also proposed to change the criteria for getting back in, “extreme vetting” and   to much tougher standards and loyalty to America values with affidavits, presumably all honestly sworn. There would be a quota system that would keep the number of immigrants to "historic levels".   Some might interpret as a code to keep America white and free of Muslims from certain Muslim countries.  This is a throwback to the race and country of origin based quotas of the 1960’s. 

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/sep/01/fact-checking-donald-trumps-immigration-speech-pho/

  http://bigstory.ap.org/article/3216907b7cad4dc7a610a14e8166975a/ap-fact-check-trump-immigration