On Wednesday night, Donald Trump spoke in Jackson, Mississippi where he labeled Hillary Clinton a “bigot,” and she fired back in kind. The real estate mogul also appeared in a Fox News town hall that was both prerecorded and hosted by Sean Hannity, who’s been acting as both an informal adviser and an enabler of Trump’s antics. This includes the town hall where Trump (as anticipated) “softened” his stance on immigration.
Yeah, this is happening. The Republican nominee — who secured his position by promising to ban Muslims, turn away Syrian children, and to build a wall for keeping out the Mexican “drug dealers and rapists” — has made perhaps his biggest flip-flop yet. Not that this should be a surprise, for Trump plays fast and loose with the biggest issues out there, but this is significant. And Ann Coulter, who threatened to pull her Trump-centered book tour if he loosened up on immigration, will probably be in mourning for the next week.
Now, on with the master class in flip-flopping. Trump assured Hannity and his audience that, yes, there would still be a Wall. This will be a “real wall,” which “will get done so quickly your head will spin.” And he plans on getting rid of the “the bad ones”:
“I mean we will get them out so fast. You know the police know who they are. This is no like great secret like I wonder who they are. These police know and the people know who they are. They know who they are and they’re going to be gone like so fast your head will spin … okay … so that’s easy, right?”
That’s easy, according to Trump. But then he’s not quite sure what to do with the “good” ones, but he thinks maybe “we work with them.” He insisted there would be no amnesty or citizenship for these “good” illegal immigrants. Instead, there would be some serious back taxin’ going on:
“No citizenship. Let me go a step further — 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 … People that have been working so hard to come into the country, are going through the process, we’re going to take them in and we’re going to cherish them, and they’re going to love us.”
Yes, he said “cherish” because Trump adores immigrants now. He’s met a lot of “really great, great people” too, who have expressed their love for him and asked him to be nicer to illegal immigrants who have been here for a few decades. And since this is “a very, very hard thing,” Trump has decided to be nice. But only if they pay back taxes.
