Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump's immigration issue debacle
We begin today’s roundup with The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky who thinks Trump’s confusing positions on immigration won’t go over well with his own voters:
Well, if they give Trump a pass on this stunning a flip-flop on the hard right’s core issue, these people are pathetic. My instinct is that they won’t, or enough of them won’t. None of these people will be Hillary voters, of course, but some may stay home, distraught that their hero caved into the very same dark forces he won their ardor by maligning. Illegal immigration is The Big Issue for the hard right. Has been for a decade. It was the No. 1 issue for Tea Partiers, despite much media misunderstanding about this; Tea Partiers viewed immigrants as a bunch of freeloaders.
If Trump drops deportation in his big speech Wednesday night, it’s hard for me to see how he doesn’t lose huge chunks of that base. Even if he speaks words something like “I’m not dropping deportation” but then proceeds to outline steps that smell like he’s dropping deportation, he’ll lose big portions of the base. And Clinton should be able to have great fun with it. This is a much grander flip-flop than anything John Kerry did in 2004, and it was the flip-flopper label that probably cost him that election.
Aaron Blake at The Washington Post looks at suggestions by some Trump campaign folks that “the wall” would be a “virtual” wall:
"You have some of his surrogates now saying that Donald Trump, when he talks about the wall, is also talking about not just a physical wall, but a technological or a virtual wall, raising some questions about what exactly that means," NBC's Hallie Jackson reported Monday afternoon. [...]
But were Trump to actually go back on his pledge to build a physical wall, it would truly be one of the biggest flip-flops in political history. While the idea of a "deportation force" was central to Trump's appeal in the GOP primary, perhaps no one policy is so synonymous with the Trump brand as that wall.
And when people have suggested that the wall is impractical or not going to happen, Trump's response has always been the same: It's not the difficult, and it'll be a real wall.