How immigration hardliners are reacting to confusion over Trump's stance
After a week of muddled messages from Donald Trump and his campaign on his immigration proposals, some immigration hard-liners are wavering between supporting the Republican nominee or trashing his latest attempt to appeal to minority voters.
Sarah Palin, a former GOP vice presidential nominee and reality television star who has endorsed him, initially blasted Trump for statements that were “not consistent with the stringent position and message” of his primary campaign.
“If Mr. Trump were to go down a path of wishy-washy positions taken on things that the core foundation of his support has so appreciated, and that is respecting our Constitution and respecting law and order in America, then yeah, there would be massive disappointment,” Palin said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal Thursday.
She also warned against the influence of some of the newest additions to the Trump campaign, saying “what we appreciate about Trump is that he hasn’t been a politician, and I would hope the people around him are not influencing him to be a typical politician.”
But in another interview Thursday -- this time with Fox News -- Palin seemed to remain steadfast in sticking by Trump.
“Candidate Trump didn’t garner a lot of enthusiastic support by being soft on anything but by having a steel spine and doing what he knows the majority of what Americans want and that is to put a stop to illegal immigration,” Palin said. “Donald Trump understands that enforcing the laws and building that wall are paramount to what the will of the people is. And thank god he is still preaching that because, if he were not, then there would be a huge erosion of support.”
Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who championed Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in the primaries for his anti-amnesty stance, said that while he was first worried that Trump was “softening,” he had become convinced that the GOP nominee remains committed to a hard line on immigration.
“When I first heard this, when [Trump] said there could be a softening, that was a shift in a direction that concerned me,” King told CNN Friday. “But as I heard the interview with Anderson Cooper that came on a little bit ago, he said there wouldn’t be a legalization. I’m happy to hear that.”
“Donald Trump has pounded that drum for a year and a half, and so I’m starting to see him restore the foundation again,” he added.
On Thursday, after Trump had shown some indication that he might soften his stance on deportation, King had said to the New York Times that “if Trump should pivot on immigration or try to redefine amnesty, he will begin to lose support from his original core base.”
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama -- who spearheaded efforts to kill amnesty proposals in the Senate -- gave Trump the benefit of the doubt, jumping on board with Trump’s latest moves.
“He’s saying, let’s fix this problem, let’s fix it and then we’ll wrestle with the people who have been here a long time,” the Trump supporter said Thursday during an interview on Fox News. “I can be supportive of that...But you have to be careful because you’ve got to have the rule of law.”
Even Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Arizona’s tough-talking police chief notorious for his strong anti-immigrant views, seemed to defend Trump’s recent policy shifts.
“I don’t know about softening the stance. He is going to meet with the minority groups. He is a great negotiator,” the Republican sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona told CNN Wednesday.
“Why not meet with the people and explain what — how he feels and maybe negotiate and see how they feel. There is nothing wrong with that,” he said.
Before Trump’s interview with Cooper Thursday, other conservative commentators, like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, critiqued Trump for his newest proposals.
“Who knew —” Limbaugh laughingly said on his radio show Thursday. “Do you imagine what it’s like to be Jeb Bush today?”
“Who knew that it would be Donald Trump to come on and convert the GOP base to supporting amnesty the same week Ann Coulter’s book comes out,” Limbaugh said. “Poor Ann, oh my God, she has this book ‘In Trump We Trust,’ and in it she says, ‘The only thing, the only thing that could cause Donald Trump any trouble whatsoever is if he flip-flops on abortion or immigration and goes amnesty,’ and it looks like he’s getting close to it.”
Coulter, for her part, seemed to blame Trump’s reversal on immigration on his circle of advisers, pointing the finger specifically at former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who is close to Trump.
“He was using all the clichés from the Gang of Eight bill,” she told ABC News, referencing the 2013 bipartisan immigration reform bill that failed to pass Congress. “I don’t know who he’s getting it from, but the idea that his base is not going to mind is nonsense. And the idea that it helps him with anyone is nonsense.”
Still, Coulter said she still backed Trump, saying this has been his only mistake to date.
“I can criticize my guy and still support him,” she said. “Since the convention, since his speech at the convention, he has not made any mistakes until now...The media just makes stuff up, reinterprets his words, doesn’t show people what he says, lies about him.”
Over the past week, Trump has seemed to indicate that he would allow some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants to remain in the U.S., and he has also said the opposite, that undocumented immigrants need to leave the country before trying to return.
On Fox News earlier this week, Trump floated a “softening” of his policies because “we’re not looking to hurt people.”
Later, he said undocumented immigrants could “pay back taxes -- they have to pay taxes. There’s no amnesty, as such, there’s no amnesty, but we work with them.”
But on CNN Thursday, Trump tried to clarify again that there is “no amnesty.”
““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,” he said.