Month: September 2016

Trump’s volunteers signing their lives away

by digby

I can’t believe anyone would actually agree to this: Via Vox:

Sign up to volunteer for Donald Trump’s campaign, and you might be giving up more than you bargained for.

Earlier this week, reporters began poring over the 2,271-word nondisclosure agreement that Trump’s campaign requires its volunteers sign. The forms are extraordinarily broad, virtually prohibiting any volunteers from criticizing Trump or his family for the rest of their lifetimes, according to Rachel Sklar, a lawyer and CNN contributor.

On Twitter, Sklar noted that the forms also bar volunteers from criticizing Trump’s brands, disclosing anything personal about Trump (including his taxes), or from even employing people who work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (That last one’s illegal, Sklar says.)

Writing for Cincinnati.com, reporter Jeremy Fugleberg notes:

[R]equiring an online volunteer to sign such a document is a requirement unique to the Trump campaign. The campaign website for his rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton, requires no agreement for online volunteers to sign up and make phone calls. 

“It’s not a typical procedure,” said Matt Moore, chairman of the GOP in South Carolina, where campaigns had volunteers making similar calls from their homes ahead of the primary in February. Moore also oversees phone bank operations as the state seeks to elect its candidates in legislative races.

Maybe this explains why why we aren’t seeing many Trump volunteers complaining about his African American outreach.

Scandalissimo

by digby

I was going to write this up until I discovered that Paul Waldman had done such a thorough job that it wasn’t necessary. Just read this piece about the way the press is going about scandal reporting:

[L]et’s look at a couple of stories that have come out in the last 24 hours. We’ll start with the one about Clinton. You may have heard recently about Judicial Watch, which is an organization established in the 1990s to destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, a mission it continues to this day. Through lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests, they try to obtain information that can be used against the Clintons, and they’re going to be a vital player in Washington politics should Hillary become president. The group’s latest “revelation” can be found in email exchanges between Doug Band, an executive at the Clinton Foundation, and Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin, when Clinton was secretary of state.

Here’s how the New York Times reported this story, under the headline “Emails Raise New Questions About Clinton Foundation Ties to State Department“:

A top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department agreed to try to obtain a special diplomatic passport for an adviser to former President Bill Clinton in 2009, according to emails released Thursday, raising new questions about whether people tied to the Clinton Foundation received special access at the department.

The request by the adviser, Douglas J. Band, who started one arm of the Clintons’ charitable foundation, was unusual, and the State Department never issued the passport. Only department employees and others with diplomatic status are eligible for the special passports, which help envoys facilitate travel, officials said.

Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign said that there was nothing untoward about the request and that it related to an emergency trip that Mr. Clinton took to North Korea in 2009 to negotiate the release of two American journalists. Mrs. Clinton has long denied that donors had any special influence at the State Department.

The first sentence of that story is questionable at best. The top aide, Huma Abedin, did not “agree to try to obtain a special diplomatic passport” for Band. He emailed her asking for it, and she replied, “OK will figure it out.” It’s hard to say whether that constitutes agreeing to anything, and at any rate, Band and the other two Clinton aides who were going to accompany the former president on this mission to North Korea didn’t actually need diplomatic passports for the trip and wouldn’t be allowed to get them anyway, nothing happened. You might have missed it, but there in the second paragraph the story notes that no diplomatic passports were ever issued.

To sum up: An executive at the Clinton Foundation made a request of Hillary Clinton’s aide, and didn’t get what he was asking for. Now maybe there is some real evidence somewhere of corruption at the State Department during Clinton’s time there, but that sure as heck isn’t it.

If you as a journalist are going to say that something “raises questions,” and if you know the answer to those questions, you have to say that, too. So in this case, the question the Band email raises is, “Did an aide to Bill Clinton get a diplomatic passport from Hillary Clinton’s staff when she was Secretary of State, something he was not entitled to?” The answer is — and pay attention to make sure you grasp this answer in all its complexity — No. (If you want a fairer version of this story, here’s the Post’s.)

Now let me point you to another story, one you probably haven’t heard about. Yesterday we learned that Donald Trump paid the IRS a $2,500 penalty over a contribution his foundation made to a PAC affiliated with Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, whom you might remember from the Republican convention, where she gave a rousing speech endorsing Trump. Does this story “raise questions”? Does it ever.

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Here’s the quick summary: In 2013, Bondi’s office received multiple complaints from Floridians who said they had been cheated out of thousands of dollars by a fraudulent operation called Trump University. While Bondi’s office was looking into the claims to determine if they should join New York State’s lawsuit against Trump University, Bondi called Donald Trump and asked him for a contribution to her PAC.

Now let’s pause for a moment to savor the idea that Bondi, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the state, would solicit a contribution from someone her office was in the process of investigating. She did solicit that contribution, and Donald Trump came through with $25,000.

Or actually, his foundation paid Bondi’s PAC the $25,000, which is an illegal contribution. Trump’s people say this was just a clerical error, and Trump himself reimbursed the foundation — that’s what the IRS fine was about. But days before getting the check, Bondi’s office announced that they were considering whether to go after Trump University, and not long after the check was cashed, they decided to drop the whole thing.

Here are a few questions this story raises: How many Floridians were scammed by Trump University? When Bondi and Trump spoke, did Trump University come up? What was the basis on which Bondi decided not to join New York’s lawsuit? Why didn’t she recuse herself from the decision? Are there any other attorneys general Trump has given money to, and had any of them received complaints about Trump University, the Trump Institute, the Trump Network, or any of Trump’s other get-rich-quick scams that were so successful in separating ordinary people from their money?

Those kinds of questions are what spur more digging and allow news organizations to not just write one story about an issue like this and then consider it done, but return to it again and again. If they decided to, they could get at least as much material out of the issue of Trump’s scams as they do out of Clinton’s alleged corruption at the State Department. But I’m guessing they won’t. Some stories “raise questions,” and others don’t.

The papers have done a good job reporting on many of Trump’s business dealings over the years. But since there isn’t any left wing Judicial Watch or Citizens United spoon-feeding them new new drips of information on a daily basis, they report it out and that’s the end of it.

They are being manipulated by the character assassins and they know it. But they don’t care. They seem to convince themselves that at some point one of these scandals will add up to a big scoop (Monica!) and until then they’ll keep the scandal mongers happy by publishing their hit jobs. The way they drool and grunt over every little nugget the right wingers throw in front of them, however, is embarrassing. (Some of them should stay off twitter.)

There are also reporters who see Hillary Clinton as a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the system and they’re going to take her down as a political act. They don’t seem to have asked themselves why they didn’t feel similarly compelled to bring down any of the earlier symbols of the system in this way — or why the right didn’t have have similar success in getting their memes into the mainstream. There are many who are far worse than her who have not received this treatment.

The system is corrupt, no doubt about it. And like every other national politician Clinton traffics in transactional favors and travels in elite circles. But why she is being held to answer for that system, particularly when there is no evidence that she crossed any new lines, is something that journalists of good will should stop and think about.

Update: Oh, and there’s nothing to see here either.
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Success in Bizarroworld

by digby

Republicans think Trump hit a home run this week. Seriously:

Republicans judged Donald Trump’s immigration play Wednesday — which consisted of dual visits to Mexico City and Phoenix — as a success for his presidential campaign.

Two-thirds of GOP members of The POLITICO Caucus — a panel of activists, operatives and strategists in 11 key battleground states — rated the Republican nominee’s meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto, followed by an evening rally in Phoenix in which he reiterated his robust immigration proposals, as hugely or moderately successful, despite the potential contradiction between the two events.

It wasn’t a unanimous verdict: a combined one-third of Republican insiders said the day was either “mostly unsuccessful” or “disastrous” for Trump. And more than 80 percent of Democrats concurred with that assessment, including 44 percent who rated Wednesday as a disaster for the Trump campaign.

But for the majority of Republicans, Trump appeared presidential and diplomatic in the foreign capital — even if some think he undermined that progress with a speech later Wednesday evening that underscored much of his hardline rhetoric on immigration from the primaries.

The day “probably helped him on balance,” said a New Hampshire Republican — who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously. “It put him in a POTUS-like setting, and he did not seem out of place. Leave the policy aside, the optics basically worked, and that was the real goal.”

And Scooter Trump can’t figure out why in the world Latinos aren’t on board:

Both Jacob Monty, a member of Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council, and surrogate Alfonso Aguilar, the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, said Thursday that they are no longer supporting the Republican nominee. Other members of the council have suggested that they might also pull their support.

“Which is actually pretty amazing, considering the speech. It was actually very consistent and has been very consistent with his plan,” Eric Trump remarked during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” calling it “really interesting.”

Referring to his father’s meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto before the speech, Eric Trump said both men left their first talks “in a very, very good way.”

Asked whether there would be an “effort” on the part of the campaign’s advisers to clarify Trump’s position with Monty and Aguilar, Trump responded, “Listen, I think so.”

“You know, it’s very important to us, and if you look at the Hispanic community and the Latino community, they’ve largely been left behind in this country,” he continued. “If you look at the African-American community it’s the same thing, right? They’ve been left behind by this country in so many places. And it’s a very, very sad thing.”

Trump’s bringing in all the smear artists

by digby

I wrote about the latest for Salon this morning:

The big news last evening was that Donald Trump had hired David Bossie, the former head of a political organization called Citizens United (yes that Citizens United) as deputy campaign manager. Beltway reporters seemed surprised by this although they shouldn’t have been. Campaign manager Kellyanne Conway had already brought him aboard the Defeat Crooked Hillary PAC, when she left to join the campaign and for good reason. He is probably the most vicious Clinton character assassin in America, having been perfecting his craft since the early 1990s. 

As it happens, I wrote about Bossie a couple of years ago for Salon, just because he’s a Zelig-like character who always seems to turn up when someone needs a hit man. In that piece I quoted liberally from the original reporting by Columbia Journalism Review’s Trudy Lieberman from 1994 that exposed the pathetic eagerness of the political press to gobble up any tid-bit the right offered up as evidence of Clintonian corruption.  Here’s a sample of what she observed:

In a cluttered office tucked away in one of the many red-brick office condominiums that ring Washington, D.C., David Bossie, source par excellence to journalists dredging the Whitewater swamp, handles one of the eighteen calls he says he gets each hour. This one is from Bruce Ingersoll, a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. The discussion centers on bonds. “I have a whole file on bond transactions,” Bossie tells Ingersoll. “I will get a report on what I find. I know you are trying to move quickly on this. You want to come out before they come out.” A few minutes later Bossie says, “I don’t know what I have to give you,” but promises to spend the next couple of hours going through materials. “You’re on deadline, I understand that.” He then points Ingersoll in another direction. “Have you done anything on Beverly? [Presumably that is Beverly Bassett Schaffer, former Arkansas Securities Commissioner.] You guys ought to look into that. There will be lawsuits against the Rose law firm,” he adds. 

Bossie led them down hundreds of blind alleys through those years which culminated in tens of millions of wasted taxpayer dollars, ruined lives and no criminal wrongdoing on the part of the Clintons. It did succeed in forever marking them as “not passing the smell test” in the eyes of the press and creating an presumption of guilt that applies to no one else in politics to this day. Citizens United and some of the other players like Judicial Watch are offering the same “service” to the media as they did 20 years ago and the media are eagerly lapping up the stories once again.

We actually should have suspected that Bossie was coming on board the campaign when we heard Trump’s latest xenophobic rant in Arizona this week. One of the subliminal themes came out of a playbook written by Bossie’s old boss at Citizens United, a man by the name of Floyd Brown. Brown spent many years disseminating smears against the Clintons and in the run-up to the 2008 election he and Bossie produced the psuedo-documentary “Hillary: The Movie”. That project ended up fundamentally altering American politics when the Supreme Court took the Citizens United case challenging the constitutionality of the McCain-Feingold law which had regulated distribution of the film. You know the rest.

Brown spent the Obama administration pushing the birther lies and accusations that the president is a secret Muslim. However, he is best known for something unrelated to Hillary Clinton. His most infamous contribution to our politics was producing one of the most notorious racist presidential campaign ads in history: the “Willie Horton” ad in 1988.

The ad started off by pointing out that Michael Dukakis was against the death penalty while George H. W. Bush was for it. The voice-over then said “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison — one was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times” over a menacing looking mug shot of the African American Horton.The voice-over continues,  “Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.” Then there’s a picture of Horton being arrested with the words  “Kidnapping, Stabbing, Raping” superimposed over the image. The narrator concludes with: “Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime.”

There wasn’t much of an ad buy but it created a firestorm in the media which meant that millions of people saw it on the TV news. Most of those connected with the campaign said they had nothing to do with it although the notorious GOP campaign strategist Lee Atwater was quoted saying: “by the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.” And as Adele Stan points out in this article for Alternet, the man who wrote speeches for Bush taking advantage of the brouhaha that accompanied the ad was none other than Trump’s good friend and adviser Roger Ailes, who also denies any involvement (but who nobody has ever believed was telling the truth about that.)

So it should not come as a surprise that with Bossie and Ailes on board we are seeing Trump go back to delivering speeches full of lurid, bloody images of immigrants maiming, raping and killing Americans with impunity — and blaming Hillary Clinton for it as he did in his speech on Wednesday night:

“Countless Americans who have died in recent years would be alive today if not for the open-border policies of this administration and the administration that causes this horrible, horrible thought process called Hillary Clinton.”

If they can find someone named Guillermo Huerta, you can be sure they’ll make an ad out of it.  This small group of right wing hit men have been ginning up racial hatred and using it to get their men elected for decades. Now they are joined with the modern alt-right iteration of their ouvre and a candidate who is perfectly willing to forthrightly make the case himself. 1988 was almost 30 years ago. But right now it seems like it was yesterday.

What will it take to finally kill this zombie lie?
by Tom Sullivan

V-O-T-E-S!
Photo by Kenny Louie [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The Washington Post and News21 confirm again:

A News21 analysis four years ago of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states found that while some fraud had occurred since 2000, the rate was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million registered voters in that 12-year span. The analysis found only 10 cases of voter impersonation, the only kind of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID at the polls.

This year, News21 reviewed cases in Arizona, Ohio, Georgia, Texas and Kansas, where politicians have expressed concern about voter fraud and found hundreds of allegations but few prosecutions between 2012 and 2016. Attorneys general in those states successfully prosecuted 38 cases of vote fraud, though other cases may have been litigated at the county level. At least one-third of those cases involved nonvoters, such as elections officials or volunteers. None of the cases prosecuted was for voter impersonation.

The Post quotes Christopher Coates, a former Justice Department voting section attorney as saying, “The claim by the liberal left that there is no voter fraud that is going on is completely false.” As is his allegation that that is their claim. It is that in-person voter fraud is virtually nonexistent.

At Slate, Mark Joseph Stern writes:

Voter fraud does happen—but it almost never occurs at the polls. Instead, as election law expert and occasional Slate contributor Rick Hasen has explained, voter fraud occurs through absentee ballots. The vast majority of voter fraud prosecutions touted by conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation involve absentee ballots that were illegally cast. And the only voting fraud schemes with the potential to actually swing elections involved mail-in ballots, not impersonation at the polls. (This makes sense: It’s much easier to forge a signature, impersonate a voter, or buy a vote in the privacy of one’s home than it is in a voting booth at the polls.)

This distinction is critically important because Republican proposals ostensibly designed to eliminate voter fraud universally target in-person fraud. GOP-sponsored voting restrictions, like the North Carolina law recently ruled unconstitutional and blocked by the Supreme Court, roll back early (in-person) voting and create draconian voter ID requirements. But all evidence suggests these measures do absolutely nothing to prevent voter fraud: They are purportedly designed to thwart voter impersonation, which, again, is virtually nonexistent. None of North Carolina’s restrictions—or any of the restrictions recently pushed through Republican-dominated legislatures—would stop mail-in ballot fraud.

Why would they not prevent that? Because absentee ballot use favors Republicans. In fact, they spend good money promoting absentee voting. I have this modest, slickly produced mailer from 2012:

They even included the blank postcards. A state request form is now required, but no photo ID.

But don’t voter ID laws apply equally to all. Yes, but they don’t impact all equally. Won’t some GOP voters get hurt too? Yes. But as I pointed out three years ago, the GOP is cynically playing the percentages:

In a report issued in April, the NC State Board of Elections estimated that 176,091 registered Democrats are without the state-issued photo identity card most will have to pay $20-$32 for before they can vote under VIVA. Plus 73,787 unaffiliated and 1,126 Libertarian voters. Among registered Republican voters, 67,639 have no photo identity cards. Over 2/3 are women.

See, GOP leaders are playing the percentages. They figure that VIVA’s voting restrictions will hurt more Democrats than Republicans — and they will hurt Republicans. Still, Republican leaders calculate that, in the end, the net result will help them hold onto power. Indefinitely.

But the real story North Carolina and the rest of the country misses is that Republican leaders consider any of their own voters hurt by these vote suppression measures collateral damage. Acceptable casualties. Expendables.

As I pointed out two years ago, when it comes to gun laws:

Imposing new gun laws is counterproductive, many Republicans believe, because most criminals get guns illegally. More regulation just infringes upon honest Americans’ rights. But more regulations passed to prevent voting illegally? A nonissue.

Then come the IDs to buy Sudafed and to get on an airplane arguments. And the appeals to what NC Gov. Pat McCrory calls “common sense.” Let’s put those to rest.

Federal courts up to and including the US Supreme Court couldn’t care less what Republican legislators think is common sense. But judges do have strong opinions about what they think is unconstitutional.

by digby

Remember when Trump explained why he didn’t do the kind of personal one-on-one campaigning that people normally do in places like Iowa and New Hampshire?

Don’t forget that when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see – cause I did big rallies, 3-4-5K people would come…and they said, wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go to people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time. I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living room they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird.

They’d think it was just weird for Trump to show  up in their living room and listen to what they have to say about their lives, right?  Everyone would be uncomfortable with that.

However, it’s different for these folks, his folks:

The New York billionaire, who has cast himself as free from the influence of the party’s donor class, has spent this summer forging bonds with wealthy GOP financiers — seeking their input on how to run his campaign and recast his policies for the general election, according to more than a dozen people who have participated in the conversations.
Private meetings with top contributors turn into strategy brainstorming sessions. High-priced dinner fundraisers are transformed into impromptu focus groups. 

During a July lunch at a Southampton, N.Y., estate, he spent at least an hour asking the 60 heavyweight contributors in attendance to each share their pick of who he should tap as his running mate. At a photo line with donors in Minneapolis in August, he polled whether he should continue using a teleprompter at public events. 

At a mountainside chateau in Aspen last week, he quizzed locals about how the campaign could better compete in Colorado. And in a pistachio orchard outside a supporter’s home in Tulare, Calif., this week, he queried farmers about how to create a “permit” system for undocumented workers. 

The episodes illustrate how Trump, who has a tiny circle of intimates, is turning to the wealthy business leaders he encounters on the fundraising circuit to serve as an ad hoc kitchen cabinet. He appointed many of his biggest financial backers to his economic advisory council, including Wisconsin billionaire Diane Hendricks, investor Tom Barrack and oil executive Harold Hamm. And there are already signs of how Trump is incorporating ideas from donors into his campaign.

How this guy became a working class hero is one of the great stories of this election. PT Barnum is laughing and laughing and laughing.

Trump’s belly (flip) flop

by digby

No translation needed: Mexican newspaper @vanguardiamx sums up Trump’s visit in one brilliant graphic pic.twitter.com/9UpbEDy3Iu

— Random Pixels blog (@Random_Pixels) September 1, 2016

Some people really liked what they heard:

Normalizing banana republic politics

by digby

This little “joke” was just casually dropped into Trump’s speech last night:

“Within ICE, I am going to create a new special deportation task force focused on identifying and quickly removing the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice just like Hillary Clinton has evaded justice, okay? Maybe they’ll be able to deport her.”

Big laughs all around I’m sure.  But this relentless pounding by a presidential candidate about Clinton for being some sort of criminal is really  unprecedented. We’ve certainly heard such things from protesters and pundits over the years. But I’ve never heard a candidate say it or suggest to his followers that he would jail his opponent if he wins.

I hear from people on both the right and the left daily who think Hillary Clinton should be jailed and potentially given the death penalty for a variety of crimes. She is loathed like no politician I’ve ever seen despite the fact that she’s actually a garden variety mainstream Democrat no worse than Obama, Kerry, Gore, Dean etc. But I still think there’s something uniquely horrifying about the GOP presidential candidate saying these things. It gives it a veneer of official policy of one of our two major parties and that’s just … bad.  There are people out there who might very well get the wrong idea, especially since Trump is running as vigilante in chief.

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The lesson for our allies: don’t trust the US

by digby

So the president of Mexico must have felt a little heat for giving Trump a platform especially after he came back to the states last night a gave a Hitler-style speech bashing Mexicans. He felt the need to explain himself in an op-ed. Google translation:

First, I was very clear-in public and in private-to emphasize that in Mexico we feel offended and hurt by his statements about Mexicans. I expressed that deserve respect, we are honest, hardworking people, we value the family and the culture of effort. Mexico and the United States are more than neighbors, we are partners and we are allies. In his campaign speeches, Trump has not treated us not as partners, not as allies, from a distorted view of Mexico and its people. So it was important to talk to him and make it clear that any future cooperation to strengthen the relationship between the two countries must be based on mutual respect. Donald Trump’s reaction was positive. I am convinced that the greater the differences, the more dialogue is needed.

Second, it was essential to put in their proper perspective the importance of Mexico to the United States. Who knows firsthand that circulate daily through the border more than one million people and 400,000 vehicles. That trade between the two countries exceeds 500 billion dollars a year. The Mexican economy is closely linked to the US. If the United States does well, to Mexico it is doing well. The United States exports more than 200 billion dollars a year to Mexico and more than six million US jobs depend on these exports.

And third, I referred to the border is a challenge that requires a joint approach to stewardship. From the United States illegally arrive weapons and millions of dollars that strengthen criminal organizations. These weapons and that money as a result of the earnings cartels of drug in the United States, generate violence in our country and that must be stopped. I was also very clear in my conversation with Trump on the border: Mexico will not pay for any wall.

My priority as president is to protect Mexicans, advocate for their rights, defend their lives and their dignity wherever they are. That’s my ultimate responsibility. Where there is a Mexican who need support from their government, we’ll be there.

Trump proved one thing to the entire world with his little gambit yesterday: don’t trust him. He’s a liar and a cheat and will stab you in the back first chance he gets.

That would be his usual MO in business and now he’s shown that he will do this with allies around the world as well.

Good job.

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I gotcher softening for ya right here

by digby

Greg Sargent has a message for the media: you’re being useful idiots:

Because Trump stopped using the words “deportation force,” some journalists are claiming he’s “shelving” mass deportations. But to focus on that is to succumb to misdirection. Trump did say he would remove criminals first. But he also said that we will be in a position to consider the “appropriate disposition of those individuals who remain” only after his “beautiful southern border wall” is built, all the criminals are removed, and illegal immigration is ended “for good.”

Even though none of those conditions is ever likely to be met, some are bizarrely treating this as if it holds out the promise of relief or legal status later. But it cannot mean this, because Trump himself flatly ruled out any meaningful path to legal status, and he also said he would rescind Obama’s efforts at executive deportation relief, including for the DREAMers which he repeatedly called “amnesty.” There is no logical way to square those priorities with the potential for genuine assimilation later.

What’s more, as Benjy Sarlin notes, Trump also outlined proposals that add up to a “far more sweeping enforcement regime” than the status quo, and a “major expansion of enforcement in general.” This includes proposals to triple the number of ICE agents, to immediately initiate deportation proceedings for any undocumented immigrant arrested for anything, and to redouble the focus on people who overstay visas. An analysis by Jose DelReal concluded that as many as six million would be targeted for short term deportation under Trump’s regime. As Sarlin rightly puts it, Trump actually recommitted to mass deportations last night, albeit in a somewhat more limited way than his earlier hallucinations about removing all the 11 million with a clap of those strong, manly hands.

Dem strategist Simon Rosenberg argues that Trump also said he’d do more to enlist local law enforcement in deportation efforts. “Trump stopped using the words ‘deportation force,’ then proposed something far more Orwellian and expansive,” Rosenberg says.

Given all of this, Trump’s short term focus on criminals and supposed shift away from mass deportations nothing more than a rhetorical ruse. It’s reporter chum. It’s designed to soften the goal of mass removal, by creating the impression that maybe possibly something can be worked out for those he calls “the good ones” later. But that option is simply not present Trump’s vision, no matter how hard people squint for it. Indeed, all of this taken together puts Trump to the right of Mitt Romney’s “self-deportation” stance. Trump would expand deportation efforts, and more generally, he was far more overtly xenophobic about keeping the dark hordes out, and far more lurid and ugly in his broad-brush tarring of illegal immigrants as criminals and invaders, than Romney was.

The media is invested in normalizing Trump’s Nazi-esque rhetoric for some reason and it’s truly disturbing. That speech was a demagogic vilification of whole groups of people as criminals and parasites. Anyone who sees that as “softening” is soft in the head.

And there is no doubt that what people actually heard in that speech was a man determined to rid this country of Mexicans and Muslims. And that’s apparently what tens of millions of Americans want to hear.

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