Yet again, Trump tries to clarify immigration position
A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows Donald Trump is trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits. Trump has 41 percent support among likely voters, while Clinton has 51 percent.
While the two candidates hurled accusations of bigotry, Trump also continued to try to clarify his immigration position, which has flip flopped over the last week.
Trump is also not backing off his incendiary charge that the Democratic presidential nominee is a bigot because progressive policies have done nothing for some minorities, reports CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds. He again made his pitch to African-American and Latino voters Thursday in New Hampshire, arguing the chaos plaguing America’s cities is Clinton’s fault.
“Her policies are bigoted because she knows they’re not going to work,” Trump said Wednesday on CNN.
“But you’re saying she’s personally bigoted,” CNN’s Anderson Cooper said.
“Oh she is. Of course she is. … She’s totally bigoted, there’s no question about that,” Trump said.
But a recent poll shows nearly 60 percent of all voters feel it’s Trump who appeals to bigots. Seventy-two percent of minorities agree.
“I think we’re going to do well with the African-Americans because they’re going to give me a chance,” Trump said.
Trump made another attempt to clear up confusion over his plan to deal with some 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.
“There’s no legalization, there’s no amnesty -- and if someone wants to go legalization route, what they’ll do is they will go, leave the country, hopefully come back in and then we can talk,” Trump said on CNN.
Earlier this week he signaled a willingness to “work with” the undocumented.
“There certainly can be a softening because we’re not looking to hurt people,” Trump said on Fox News.
“They’ll pay back taxes, they have to pay taxes, there’s no amnesty, as such, there’s no amnesty, but we work with them,” he said the next day.
That sounded a lot like a position that Jeb Bush put forward and Trump rejected in the primary season.
“They would earn legal status, they wouldn’t earn citizenship, they would earn legal status,” Bush had said.
On Thursday, Bush said Trump sounded like a typical politician.
“All the things that Donald Trump railed against, he seems to be morphing into -- it’s kind of disturbing,” Bush said Thursday in a WABC radio interview.