Asked about why they haven’t hit Donald Trump on all his flip-flops, the Clinton campaign has been pretty forthright—before you can attack someone’s policy, they first have to have a policy. And statements such as:
"And you know, I win. I win. In life, I win. I want to win. I have a very winning temperament, okay? I know how to win. And we are going to win. And we're going to make America great again. You know, we are going to make America great again. That's what it's all about."
This is not policy.
But on immigration at least, it seemed like Donald Trump has something of a position. We get a wall.
We are going to build a great border wall to stop illegal immigration, to stop the gangs and the violence, and to stop the drugs from pouring into our communities.
We get a mass deportation of 11 million people.
At rallies and debates over the last year, Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to round up and deport the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally, sometimes saying he would eject them all in two years.
And a block on Muslims entering the country, along with anyone else from a Muslim country.
Trump also called again for a temporary suspension of “immigration from some of the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world that have a history of exporting terrorism.”
But now that Trump has managed to drive his support among minorities to record low levels, and his new campaign team has him giving a pitch usually reserved for budget soda, Trump has cancelled planned speeches on immigration and started talking about immigration with all the firmness of unset Jello.
During that event, Trump addressed his meeting with Hispanic leaders last weekend in Manhattan, remarking that "there certainly can be a softening because we're not looking to hurt people, we want people — we have some great people in this country."
So what does this “softening” look like? It looks like this …
"Somebody was saying on one of the shows today that maybe probably Trump won't build the wall—we're building the wall. A wall is gonna be built. It's easy," Trump said. "And we're building the wall. We're going to have very, very tough standards. You come into the country, it's tough."
What's Trump’s position? As always, it’s a position with less depth than the oil sheen on a mud puddle. There’s a wall. There’s “tough.” But when he’s standing in front of his core audience, Trump continues to advocate the wall and “following the law,” which his core audience reads as what he's always said.
Trump: They’ve been here how many years? We’re going to do something. For people that have been — look, we’re either going to have a country or we’re not going to have a country. But many people are very fine people. and I’m sure these are very, very fine people. They’re going to go, and we’re going to create a path where we can get them into this country legally, okay? But it has to be done legally.
Eckman: You will deport them first, right?
Trump: They’re going to go, and then come back and come back legally.
What’s the real plan for getting 11-12 million undocumented Americans hustled across the border (or back onto planes, since more than half of them originally overstayed visas). Trump did offer at least one idea now under review by the new management.
Donald Trump's new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, on Sunday said that the creation of a "deportation force" for undocumented immigrants under a Trump administration was "to be determined."