Thursday, August 25, 2016

The VICE Guide to the 2016 Election: The Far Right Is Pissed that Donald Trump Wants to Be Nicer to Immigrants

Ever since he kicked off his presidential campaign in June of 2015, Donald Trump has been pissing people off. He's pissed people off by being xenophobic, by being mean, and by just not making sense. Traditionally, his list of political adversaries has included most women, Muslims, Latinos, and a surprisingly large contingent of his own political party. But through it all, the American far right has largely been on his side—particularly members of the far-right who agreed with the hawkish immigration policies Trump has placed at the center of his campaign.

That is, perhaps, until now.

"He had a stated immigration policy position," said Rick Tyler, a Republican strategist and former communications director for Senator Ted Cruz's presidential campaign. "Now he's changing it." According to Tyler, Trump has become another in a long line of Republicans who "say all these things that sound terrific, then get to Washington, get assimilated by leadership, and drink the Kool-Aid, and nothing happens."

That's because all of a sudden, after months of campaigning on his plans to deport undocumented immigrants and limit migration to the United States, the Republican presidential candidate has started to suggest that he wants to be nicer to undocumented immigrants.

In an interview on Fox News Tuesday, Trump claimed he was "working with a lot of people in the Hispanic community," on a solution to the problem of illegal immigration in the US. "We want to come up with a really fair, but firm answer. It has to be very firm," Trump said. "But we want to come up with something fair."

Over on Twitter, where Trump turns to read and retweet supportive statements and memes, often from fringe right-wing sources, the statements—and the subsequent speeches Trump has made echoing those lines—have sparked a predicable backlash.

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