The Trump Sideshow Plays Right into Democrats’ Handsby MONA CHAREN July 10, 2015 12:00 AM
resident Obama seems on the verge of the most abject diplomatic capitulation in American history — to Iran, our bitterest enemy — and Republicans are arguing about Donald Trump? The prospect of a deal with Iran is dumbfounding and infuriating, as the U.S. held all the cards in the protracted negotiations and yet executed serial surrenders to the Iranians, rather like a courtier bowing his way backward from a monarch. While the Obama administration is paving the way for a possible mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv or New York in the near term, we’re all tying ourselves in knots about what Donald Trump said about Mexicans. The Democrats seem to have a Trump card.
Immigration arouses tremendous rage among both Left and Right. The Left, always panting to push grievance buttons, transforms illegal immigrants into yet another clientele — as if those who enter the country illegally are entitled to legal status, benefits, and even citizenship. They establish “sanctuary cities” as if enforcing immigration laws amounts to persecution. This drives the Right crazy. You don’t break into my house and then demand the keys, they fume. While I like a good brawl as much as the next person, it seems that Trump is the answer only if the question is: Why can’t we get more oafish egomaniacs into politics? Just when the Republican party needs finesse and sensitivity when discussing immigration; just when it needs to focus on issues that unite all sectors of the electorate, including Hispanic and Asian voters; it gets a blowhard with all the nuance of a grenade.
Trump’s smear about Mexican immigrants was about as far away as you can get from Ronald Reagan’s “Hispanics are Republicans, they just don’t know it.” He tarred most Mexican immigrants as drug dealers, criminals, and rapists, allowing only as an afterthought that some may be good people. He claimed to have discussed the matter with border guards. (Would those officers please step forward?) In any case, crude and vulgar people always preen that they are brave truth tellers. Trump has achieved his objective — making himself the center of attention — but he has subtracted from our sum total of knowledge about the immigration issue. According to an analysis of Census Bureau data by the Immigration Policy Center, only 1.6 percent of immigrant males between the ages of 18 and 39 are incarcerated, compared with 3.3 percent of the native-born. There are terrible stories of immigrants committing crimes, and it’s certainly fair to demand that criminal aliens be deported with dispatch. Sanctuary cities are a disgrace. But just as Dylann Roof doesn’t represent white people, Mexican rapists don’t represent anyone other than themselves either.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420974/donald-trump-immigration-controversy-helps-democrats?target=topic&tid=1707
