August 29, 2016 02:36 PM UTC

Trump's Immigration Collapse Center Stage This Week

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• by: Colorado Pols

Republican Presidential nominee Donald Trump will reportedly roll out some sort of new policy proposal on immigration reform this week. The plan is for Trump to clarify and expand upon his immigration reform proposals in a big speech on Wednesday in Arizona.

Trump is being forced to get into greater specifics about his immigration policies after flopping all over the place in a series of interviews last week. Apparently, the American public would like to know more about a set of policies which until now have consisted mainly of a) Promising to build a giant wall along the Mexican-U.S. border, and b) Magically identifying and deporting just the bad immigrants.

CNN explains how we got to this point, and why this is “immigration week” in Trumpville:

Donald Trump’s lack of clarity on his plans for dealing with some 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country has been so head-spinning in recent weeks it’s starting to look deliberate.

Facing headwinds among moderate voters who view his past rhetoric as racist, but trying to assuage his core conservative base, Trump has attempted something of an image makeover during the past two weeks — leaving Democrats and Republicans alike unclear on where actually Trump stands.

Naturally, Trump is blaming the big bad media for the fact that his immigration proposals don’t actually make any sense when you have to account for things like, you know, details and stuff. This isn’t going over very well with actual members of the big bad media, as the Washington Post explains:

The idea that we have “no control” over our border is not true. As Jerry Markon reported, as of one year ago, most available evidence indicated that thanks in part to stepped up border security efforts in recent years, “illegal immigration flows have fallen to their lowest level in at least two decades.” But beyond that, let’s pause to marvel at the spectacle of Trump blaming the media for this focus on mass deportations. That promise has been key to Trump’s candidacy for over a year. [Pols emphasis] As early as August of 2015 Trump was already saying on national television that all undocumented immigrants in this country “have to go.” A month later he said that his plan was to round them up “in a humane way.” A couple months after that Trump indicated that “they’re gonna have to go out,” and if not, “we don’t have a country.” In February of this year Trump said: “We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally. They will go out.”

Now Trump insists that the aspect of his plan that really matters is his pledge to secure the border. Now, it’s true that Trump has long emphasized border security. But Trump also frequently vowed mass deportations, and that probably helped him win the nomination. Poll after poll after poll showed that GOP voters supported this goal.

Much to the chagrin of the Trump campaign, the media is also figuring out that Trump’s immigration policies were always intentionally vague. Or as Peter Beignet writes for The Atlantic:

What the commentary of the last few days has generally overlooked is that while immigration was key to Trump’s success in the Republican primary, Trump never actually offered an immigration policy. To the contrary, his success rested in large measure on his ability to avoid one.

And there you have it. Perhaps words still have meaning in politics after all.