For Donald Trump, the die is cast and the wall is pledged
Presidential candidate Donald Trump, right, and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto prepare to deliver a joint press conference in Mexico City on Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2016. Credit: AFP/Getty Images / Yuri Cortez
Donald Trump can change trappings and talking points. He can add and subtract proposals and pivot. But on his signature issue, the die is cast.
Kicking off his campaign last year, Trump said Mexico “is sending people that have lots of problems. . . . They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
A couple of weeks later, Chris Wallace of Fox News challenged him on the air for evidence. Falsely, Trump said “Illegal immigration wasn’t a subject that was on anybody’s mind until I brought it up at my announcement.”
There would be a border wall, and Mexico would fund it, he vowed. There would be a deportation force, he said. The message from the start: The cunning Mexicans will no longer play us for suckers by sending us their unwanted.
So he won the cheers he cherished at rally after rally. Fans roared: “Build that wall!” Millions of Republicans voted for him, and defying all expectations, he won the nomination.
He claimed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, would allow “open borders” if elected (which, of course, she denies). He said a judge’s Mexican heritage was behind an adverse ruling on part of a Trump University fraud case. He posed for a photo on Cinco de Mayo with a taco bowl.
After striking chords like these and playing them to the hilt, all the recent meeting, consulting, “softening,” pre-speech hype, media-blaming and re-explaining could make little practical difference.
No matter what he says or where he travels, Trump isn’t backing off; he’s just re-emphasizing down the final stretch that he is the “tough-on-illegal-immigration” candidate.
Facts, policies, Congress — all beside the point for his immediate purpose.
It was widely reported that new Trump campaign chief Stephen Bannon, most recently head of pro-Trump Breitbart News, encouraged his boss’ trip Wednesday to meet with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to show forceful statesmanship.
For the day’s intended message, it makes sense to refer to still-loyal Breitbart News — which played the meeting with Peña Nieto as a sign of the Mexican leader’s weakness.
“Peña Nieto’s suddenly diplomatic attitude this week marks the second time a Mexican leader has backed down after expressing initial hostility to Trump, who is running on a pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, funded by taxing remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S.”
The other Mexican leader was former president Vicente Fox, who later “apologized to Trump” for profane language in denouncing the wall proposal.
On Wednesday, Fox was blasting Trump’s visit as an opportunistic political stunt — and apologized on behalf of the country for the current president inviting him.
But essentially, the Bannon-Breitbart-Trump message seems to be that the wall has plausibility no matter what other politicos, north or south of the border, may say right now.
Two days before Election Day will mark the 30th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan signing a law that granted amnesty to many of the then-estimated 3.2 million immigrants who were not in the United States legally.
Which is to say that this issue lives on for decades and is likely to continue for decades more.
For Trump, the key is the wall today and the wall forever. The rest is just a bunch of nettlesome facts, laws and details that won’t matter to too many people until he takes office.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
