‘Trump Revealed’ writers: Immigration shift was no surprise

Donald Trump’s recent pivot on immigration should not have come as a surprise to anyone who knows about his career-long knack for giving the crowd what it wants, according to two Trump biographers.

Washington Post investigative reporter Michael Kranish and Washington Post senior editor Marc Fisher, authors of “Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power,” discussed Trump’s evolving immigration stance in an appearance on Yahoo News Now with Stephanie Sy.

The Republican presidential candidate who during the primary called for a deportation force to round up the nation’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants has toned down his rhetoric over the past week. As the general election draws closer, he’s meeting with leaders in the Hispanic community and even entertaining “softening” the immigration laws currently on the books.

For Kranish and Fisher, this change is more or less in line with a lifelong showman who’s more interested in telling the people what they want to hear rather than developing a principled stance on a given issue.

“It’s another example of a basic fact about Donald Trump, which is that he is highly skeptical of ideology. He’s really not a conservative. He’s really not a liberal,” Fisher told Sy. “He’s someone who considers himself a bit of a provocateur, a man of the people, a populist, and so he’s willing to do more or less what the crowd wants.”

He said that the reality TV star knows how to read crowds and thinks of himself as someone who acts upon instinct.

“He’s very loath to take a principled position because he loves to live life in the moment, as he puts it,” Fisher said. “So on an issue like immigration, he’ll follow the crowd. He’ll follow what’s needed politically in the moment.”

Kranish pointed out that Trump was not always thought of as the anti-illegal-immigration firebrand.

In 2012, during a Republican presidential debate, then presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested that the solution to illegal immigration was “self-deportation.” That was Romney’s clunky term to describe the use of attrition instead of forcible deportation to reduce the population of people living illegally in the U.S. People would voluntarily return to their home country if the U.S. federal government made it more difficult to stay here, he argued.

At the time, Trump called Romney’s self-deportation policy “crazy” and “maniacal” and predicted that it would alienate Latino voters.

But when he launched his GOP primary campaign last summer, Trump’s caustic statements about illegal immigration made Romney’s proposal look meek in comparison. Among other things, Trump accused the Mexican government of sending “rapists” and criminals over the U.S. border.

“When Donald Trump ran for president and talked about [how] he’s going to have a forced deportation, it was a dramatic shift,” Kranish said Wednesday. “So if he’s now going back to something that’s closer to what Mitt Romney proposed, that is a good example of a pivot.”