Immigration Man: A Tale of Two Donalds
If you watched TV news yesterday, you saw two distinctly different versions of Donald Trump. The first was the Trump who visited Mexico in the afternoon, met with President Enrique Peña Nieto, and emerged to stand at a podium looking solemn, gave a few calm, conciliatory remarks, and answered a couple of key questions. (“We did discuss the wall. We didn’t discuss payment of the wall. That’ll be for a later date.”)
The second Trump went to Phoenix in the evening and yelled for about an hour. “No. 1, we will build a great wall along the southern border!” “Mexico will pay for the wall, 100 percent! They don’t know it yet, but they’re gonna pay for the wall!” “I want extreme vetting … It’s extreme!” “[Hillary Clinton’s] plan is to let everybody in, and destroy our country, by the way!” “She doesn’t have the strength or the stamina to make America great again, believe me!” “We will have a deportation task force [to] bring justice … Just like Hillary Clinton has evaded justice — maybe they’ll be able to deport her!”
You know that quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function”? Well, the spectacle of the two Trumps was more than the media could stand. The concept of “first-rate intelligence” in analyzing Trump’s wildly different Wednesday activities left commentators almost unable to function coherently.
On Fox News, Sean Hannity said, “It seems that this probably turned out for Donald Trump to be a pivotal moment, and I would argue probably the best day of his campaign. He looked presidential in Mexico.” But Trump was so different once he got back to America, Sean. Was all the yelling and the conflating Hillary Clinton with illegal immigration “presidential” too?
On CNN, commentator and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said, “Donald Trump’s message tonight … was ‘America First’ … He’s got about an 18-point lead in the demographic of white males who are voting in this election. They have a high propensity of voting, and this speech is clearly geared at those individuals right now.” But what about all that talk about “outreach” to black and Latino voters that the Trump surrogates arrayed across TV news — including you, Corey — are insisting that Trump has been doing to broaden his base rather than just cement his core constituency?
On MSNBC, radio host Hugh Hewitt said, “Donald Trump goes down to Mexico, has a very perfectly normal diplomatic engagement with the president of Mexico, has a great press conference afterwards, takes questions, which Secretary Clinton won’t take from the press in any setting, and then comes back and gives a very, very sophisticated speech … We do points one through 10 first, and then we’ll talk about the other people. I think it is a softening. I think it was sophisticated and very powerful.” Hold on, Hugh: Who are you referring to when you say “the other people”?
As for late-night television, Stephen Colbert summed up the reaction of some viewers who’d been watching Trump — clips of Trump, analyses of Trump — all of Wednesday afternoon and evening. Upon noting that Trump had visited Mexico, Colbert whispered sotto voce: “Quick — build the wall!”
