-- He cannot speak intelligently about his immigration plan's "
softening".
Donald Trump on Thursday night insisted on CNN that his recent comments about immigration reflect a "hardening" of his stance, but the Republican nominee refused to directly answer questions about his position on deportation.
"I don’t think it’s a softening," Trump told CNN's Anderson Cooper when the host noted that Trump actually said there could be a "softening" of his policy on deportation. “I’ve had people say it’s a hardening, actually.”
Despite the fact that he does not demonstrate a working knowledge of his campaign's core issue, that response might have been TMI, given Trump's propensity for sexual entendre'. (
This list is only up to date through June; his most recent comment mentioned Hillary's celebrity support as "
not very hot". It does not appear as if he was referencing the male celebrities. I can't wait to see what he says when someone tells him today is
Women's Equality Day. Oh, and
thanks to Seth Meyers for the inspiration to write this paragraph.)
Update: PolitiFact actually fact-checked Trump's claim with barely any naughty tongue-in-cheek that I could discern or even infer (the definition of 'hot' they use is 'popular', and not 'sexy'), and found it to be
Mostly False.
Throughout the interview, Cooper attempted to clarify Trump's stance on deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants, but with no success.
When he first asked Trump if he had a change of heart about deporting all undocumented immigrants, Trump launched into a rant about building a wall and said that he will give more details on his plan in a week. In addition to building a "great wall," Trump said he'll use "tunnel technology" and "all sorts of e-verify."
Trump reiterated that he will deport the "bad" undocumented immigrants, but suggested that he doesn't have much of a plan beyond that.
"After that, we’re going to see what happens," he said.
Trump dodged the question again when Cooper asked if there would be a path to legalization.
"You know it’s a process? You can’t take 11 at one time and just say, ‘Boom, you’re gone.’ We have to find where these people are," Trump said in response.
He
put himself in
this position. Being asked questions he doesn't know the answer to should be familiar territory for him; certainly his being vague and defensive about the questions is old hat for the rest of us. But his base
isn't noticing the hypocrisy, and something on the order of 35-40% of the nation's voters like it just like that. It's more than 50% of the voters in Texas and several other southern and mountain western states.
I'm so old I remember when people carried beach sandals, i.e. "flip-flops" to the Republican National Convention, and wore Band-Aids on their chins with purple hearts colored on them. Either a lot of conservatives have died since 2004 or the nation's collective IQ has gone up a few points. I'm guessing both, causatively, though some days it barely seems like it.
-- Trump's new campaign manager Steve
Brietbart Bannon has been found to have been
charged with domestic violence in the 1990s, and also to be currently registered to vote at a home which is both
vacant and scheduled for demolition. Perhaps we have at last found the infamous Voter Fraud Unicorn in Florida, the one that Greg Abbott and Ken Paxton have been so afraid of that also
lives in disguise as a chupacabra in Texas.
If you're Trump's campaign manager, is taking millions of dollars from the Russians better or worse than being a voter fraudster who beats his wife? I report, you decide ... because the Trumpets don't give a shit either way.
Here's what bad about Trump being so incompetent, and not just for the GOP but the nation: it leaves Hillary Clinton with no competition whatsoever, and that makes her an even lousier candidate than she already is. She's been on cruise control to the White House since the convention, and not even her own foundation issues will likely slow her down much.
Does make great fodder for the cartoonists, though.
