Much of the uncertainty in the week leading up to the speech centred on how Mr Trump meant to deal with millions of undocumented immigrants who had not engaged in criminal activity.
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Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto doubled down on his assertion that he told Donald Trump that his country would not pay for a border wall the Republican presidential nominee has proposed on Twitter Thursday afternoon. It was only after he was back on American soil that he said, “They are great people, great leaders, but they are going to pay for the wall”. Another member, Texas pastor Ramiro Pena, said he would have to reconsider being part of “a scam”.
But you’ll never hear that from the rabidly anti-Trump Washington Post, which is now essentially indistinguishable from such Leftist mouthpieces as Media Matters or, for that matter, the Vichycon precincts, manned on a daily basis by Jennifer Rubin (looky, here’s another one now!), on the former Right.
Trump raised about $37 million in July, some two-thirds of which came from small-dollar donations.
“Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone”, Trump claimed, attacking the current US immigration system for being “worse than anybody ever realized”. His immigration speech was a hateful, anti-immigrant set of policies aligned perfectly with the centerpiece of his campaign, which has always been simple and straightforward – immigrants are not welcome in Trump’s America. But the speech might have done little to appeal to the broader electorate – especially suburban white voters who could be crucial on Election Day.
Eventually he lumped rival Hillary Clinton in with undocumented criminals and mused about whether he should deport her, too.
Hours after the press conference, Peña Nieto sent a tweet in direct contrast to that claim: “At the beginning of the conversation with Donald Trump I made it clear that Mexico will not pay for the wall”, he said, in Spanish.
“His policy stances could represent a huge threat to Mexico, and I am not prepared to keep my arms crossed and do nothing”, Pena Nieto said.
“Within ICE I’m going to create a new special deportation task force”.
Bannon, now called the CEO of the Trump campaign, has been a fan of the hard-line approach on immigration as well as other issues. He wasn’t backing away from that terminology on Wednesday night.
But other Latino advisers, including Florida pastor Mario Bramnick and Kentucky State Senator Ralph Alvardo, said they would continue working with the Trump campaign.
“If we can save American lives, American jobs and American futures, together we can save America itself”.
Trump earlier in the day paid his first foreign visit as Republican presidential nominee to Mexico at the invitation of Pena Nieto. “You can see that Latino voters, African American voters, they see through these lies”. Trump insisted he’d revoke President Barack Obama’s executive actions allowing those immigrants to remain in the country.
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Trump’s calculation is that he needs the blue-collar worker in OH or Pennsylvania much more than the new Latino voter in Colorado or Arizona.
