SEPTEMBER 1, 2016
Photo: Getty
Wednesday was a doozy of a day in the 2016 Presidential race.
Hillary Clinton delivered a detailed speech on American exceptionalism at the American Legion convention in Cincinnati. Did you hear anything about it? I didn’t think so. Because Wednesday was all about Donald Trump.
Reportedly thanks to the machinations of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, the Republican nominee ditched his press corps (unheard of unless a nominee is entering a war zone) and flew to Mexico City to meet with the country’s president Enrique Peña Nieto, at his invitation, to talk about God knows what. After basing his campaign on sending back 11 million unauthorized immigrants back to their country of origin, Trump danced around that question as well as declining to answer how he would go about breaking up families to deport the 11 million.
Peña Nieto and Trump then took questions from the press, including from those few American reporters who were able to get a flight and their passports together to attend the hastily-called confab. Trump spoke slowly and calmly, as if he’s back on his meds, all in what appeared to be an attempt to look Presidential.
To give a little perspective on this whole invitation business, Peña Nieto has only a 23% favorability rating among Mexican voters, but Trump is only at 4% favorable among the same group. Why in God’s name would Peña Nieto invite someone to stand at his side who is even more unpopular than he is? One might think that he could have used the occasion to dress down Trump for his “they’re sending rapists” description of Mexican immigrants, but Peña Nieto just stood there taking it all in, declining to defend his country’s honor. This “profile in cowardice” moment on the part of the Mexican President will only hurt him, since Trump can skip away thinking that he had gotten the upper hand.
Not for long.
Trump then flew back across the border to Phoenix, where that night he was to deliver his long-awaited speech on immigration reform. His campaign manager, pollster Kellyanne Conway, had been serving as Trump’s hype surrogate on every news network that would have her, urging audiences to tune into the speech to find out what Trump’s position on immigration really is. What did we learn?
Not much.
It was basically the same-old, same-old. It seems that whenever Trump is one-on-one with an interviewer, he seems almost reasonable. (Almost.) But whenever he’s in front of a worshiping crowd, however, it’s all red meat, all the time. The Phoenix speech seemed to undo any good that he managed to achieve in Mexico City earlier that day. In Phoenix it was wall, wall, wall, deport, deport, deport. Trump’s Mexico City statement about wanting to keep jobs within the Americas was tossed aside for his usual “America First” motto. Unbelievable.
It was as if Trump had a brief taste of diplomacy, held it in his mouth until he crossed back into the United States, and then violently spit it out. Diplomacy? Yuck!
As a result of the harsh anti-Mexican tone of the Phoenix speech, a number of members of Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council (great job, guys!) decided on Thursday morning to resign. It will likely have little effect on the Trump campaign, but at least those who quit will be able to sleep better at night.
All this comes as polls have begun to show that Clinton’s double-digit post-convention bounce has evaporated and that her lead has now shrunk to 6-7 points. Still enough for a victory, but it’s getting scary out there.
