All Episodes
Previous Next
Aug. 22, 2020 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
52:27
Peter Brimelow: "The Trump Report Card--So Far" (2017)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Our next speaker has been actively defending the founding stock of the United States for almost as long as I have.
His website, Vidair, has been a strong and consistent voice for what he calls patriotic immigration reform.
For 18 years, few people have been more steady and more dedicated to this great cause of ours than Peter Brimelow.
I have told a story about Peter Brimelow just last year, but there are so many new faces here, and I like the story so well that I'm going to repeat myself and tell it again.
This has to do with a time some years ago when the Brimelow family was at home listening to the radio, and there was a country and western singer singing a song, and one of the little girls asked, Mommy, what's this song about?
And Mrs. Brimelow replied, this lady is sad because she loves a man who doesn't love her.
And the other little girl piped up with the immediate solution.
Daddy will love her.
Daddy loves everyone.
Now, I tell this story in the context of the fact that the SPLC, of course, considers video to be a hate site.
But Daddy loves everyone.
Could you welcome Peter Brunelow?
Thank you.
Thanks, Jared.
Wow, it does work.
And thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
And congratulations, Jared, on this turnout.
As you know, although he knew the venue was full, Jared did not...
raise the prices on the last few seats, thus showing that the alt-right really doesn't care about free market economics.
Now, I've been away from my cell phone for two or three minutes, so can anybody tell me what he's done now?
Has he invaded some enemy of Israel?
Has he invaded a friend of Israel?
Has he arrested Jerry Brown for trying to turn California into a sanctuary state, which is a felony aiding illegal aliens?
Has he deported Kamala Harris?
We told him to last night.
He hasn't done anything that everybody knows?
Well, the day's not over.
Let's give him some time.
I think, from my point of view, the definitive word on Trump came from the blogger Steve Sayer we posted back in April.
Which I'll read to you.
He said, as a Los Angelino, I've long felt that Donald Trump is the second New Yorker ever, behind only George Steinbrenner, who owned the New York Yankees baseball team from 1974 to his death in 2010.
Unlike most team owners of the times, he battled constantly with his players and managers, especially Billy Martin, whom he fired five times.
Virtually every week seemed to be a crisis if you were reading the sports pages.
From 1975 to 1989, Steinbrenner changed managers 18 times, but he won two World Series.
Eventually, Steinbrenner slowed down and let Joe Torrey win four World Series for him.
To a Los Angeles Dodgers fan like myself, Steve went on.
He said, who was used to the Dodgers having two managers over 45 years and one announced for 67 years, the Yankee revolving door soap opera always seemed like it couldn't possibly go on a day longer.
But it did go on.
And for many years.
And it was very successful.
That's how Donald Trump likes him.
He spent his life on building sites.
He likes chaos.
So we all have to get used to it.
Now, my subject today is grading Trump's performance, especially from my own perspective, vdare.com's perspective, with single-issue voters on the immigration question.
And this chaos is certainly irritating.
It makes grading difficult.
You've got to see through the chaos and focus on the big picture, the emerging building.
But I'll end the suspense.
Donald Trump gets an A. And he gets an A for one simple reason.
He's definitely not Hillary Clinton.
*applaudissements*
As a matter of fact, he's definitely not Jeb Bush either.
So let's make that an A+.
Bush would have had insult to injury.
And all the coyote news talking heads would be telling us about the conservative case of Bush's amnesty immigration surge.
It would have been unbearable.
Because an amnesty immigration surge is absolutely what we would have gotten from Clinton.
And a complete collapse of enforcement at the borders, let alone in the interior.
And a massive increase in refugees, i.e.
expedited, subsidized, politically favored immigrants.
Not refugees in any classical sense at all.
She would have gotten the full mokel.
I can't overemphasize how important this is.
The 2016 election was, as Mike Anton called it, the Flight 93 election.
It was a desperate attempt, like those people in the plane that went down in Pennsylvania on 9 /11, to get control of the flight or die.
That was what had to be done.
There was just no alternative.
A little while ago, I was talking to a Beltway immigration patriot.
They do exist.
And she was grumbling about Trump not doing this or that, or actually more to the point, as I'll argue, not doing it fast enough.
And so I eventually said to her, you know, what if Hillary had been elected?
She instantly said, we'd be in hell.
We'd be in hell.
We have a totalitarian left in this country, a totalitarian left.
We saw them outside today.
And they really believed that they were on the brink of knocking out the historic American nation.
The American nation had evolved by the time of the 1965 Immigration Act, which opened the floodgates after a 50-year pause.
They were going to do it with this final surge of third-world immigration.
They were going to import enough demographic change to make their election irreversible.
And then, of course, there's the Supreme Court.
You know, the more I think about it, I can't overstate the significance of the gay marriage decision, the homosexual marriage decision.
What it means is, regardless of the merits of the issue, the question is how it was arrived at.
For the courts to find a right to homosexual marriage in the Constitution, if they can do that, they can do anything.
They can do anything.
They can decide the First Amendment doesn't protect speech.
And you can see they have begun to deploy the arguments on this, that free speech causes stress for the people, for various minorities.
They could decide the Second Amendment doesn't mean citizens should have guns.
They'll say militia means the army or something.
And I think, perhaps most significant, they can decide that the Electoral College doesn't comport with the principle of one man, one vote.
Or for that matter, the election of senators doesn't comport with the principle of one man, one vote.
Because after all, there's a senator from Delaware and a senator from California.
These states are vastly different in size.
They've already done this with the states.
At one stage, several states used to have all kinds of balancing mechanisms internally.
Some of them would have senators or they would weight rural districts differently to try and protect the various communities against being dominated by the big cities, as you see now in California and Illinois.
But that was overthrown in the 1960s by the Warren Court.
There's no reason why they can't apply this to federal elections and just simply go to some type of a unitary state situation.
And they mean to do that.
You know, this question of judicial imperialism...
Judge-made law, judges legislating on the bench.
It's been developing, really.
It's a crisis that's been developed for many years.
I would trace it back to Brown v.
Board in'54, the segregation decision.
But maybe Sam Dixon has other ideas.
But it's getting worse and worse.
I wrote a cover story about it 30 years ago this year in Forbes because I pointed out that it was judge-made law that had created the tort crisis.
People were able to sue for all kinds of things that 30 or 40 years earlier they hadn't been able to sue for.
Not because there had been a change in the law, a legislated change in the law, but simply because judges decided that the law meant something different from what they had always thought to mean.
And this had the most profound economic consequences.
But it's now completely out of control, the judicial imperialism.
We can see this in the decisions about Trump's executive orders about the travel ban and trying to get control of the refugee inflow.
In effect, various leftist judges simply tried to seize control of immigration policy.
They decided that foreigners absolutely possibly have a right to immigrate to the US.
Or the president doesn't have the right to change his mind on the recommended number of immigrants for that year.
They are right on the point of wresting immigration policy away from the democratic control and simply writing into the Constitution.
It's been mixed.
The Supreme Court has, to a certain extent, stopped them, which is why the Supreme Court decision choice was so important.
If it had been up to Hillary, we would have had another wise Latina, like Sotomayor.
You remember that she said that she could make better decisions because she was Hispanic.
Funnily enough, when Donald Trump said exactly the same thing in reverse about that judge he was appearing before in the Trump University case, that he thought he was prejudiced because he was Mexican, the whole world fell on his head, not for the first time, or the last time.
But, of course, he's right.
It's okay for Sotomayor to say it, but it's not okay for him to say it.
There are people who legislate on the basis of their ethnic interests, judges who rule on the basis of ethnic interests.
That's what would have happened.
So that's why I think it really matters that Trump won.
It'll go on mattering.
You know, I was very influenced.
You know, I didn't go into this, but I used to be a contender.
I was involved in all these mainstream media operations, and I used to write for commentary magazine.
And I used to know all these people quite well.
And the long-term editor of commentary, Noam Porhoretz, who's sort of like the godfather of the neoconcerative movement, I went to dinner with him at a club, a dinner club I used to attend, around about the time of the first Gulf War.
And he was holding forth.
He was fanatically in favor, not just of the war, but of Bush's then going up to Baghdad and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
And I was puzzled by this.
It's not so much that I'm against the use of American force.
In fact, I think the Americans should invade Mexico.
But... But I wanted to know what was going to happen next after they removed Saddam.
And Norman said, it just doesn't matter.
It just doesn't matter.
The important thing is to get him out.
And, of course...
Bush 1 didn't do that, but Bush 2 did do it with the smoking ruin that we see there today, as a result.
But for Norman, that smoking ruin was a feature, as people say.
It was a feature, that smoking ruin, not a bug.
He wanted to seek chaos in the area.
He didn't want to seek a strong government that might possibly threaten Israel.
That's how I feel about the situation here.
In the White House, Washington may be a smoking ruin, but it's better than having Clinton there.
Anything is better than having Clinton there.
Well, that's the negative case for Trump.
I guess I have to go on and try and grade his actual performance in office.
I give it an...
Does anybody here speak Latin?
Egrotat. Is that pronounced right?
Egrotat. A-E-G-R-O-T-A-T.
It's a degree that you can get at Oxford if you're sick on examination day.
In other words, they will let you pass the examination if they think you would have passed it anyway.
They just don't give you a grade.
And that's more or less what I would do with Trump.
He is an agritat.
Thank you, John.
It's not that he's sick.
It really pulls me that people go around saying that they think Trump is mentally unbalanced when it's quite clear that Hillary Clinton is mentally unbalanced.
She has a thing that psychologists call narcissistic entitlement syndrome.
I'm serious about this.
I mean, if you read this new book that came out, Shattered, about the election, repeatedly when she lost primaries, and above all when she lost the election, she was consumed by rage, which strikes me as a really strange reaction.
And depression, sadness, I can see, but anger.
What's she got to be angry about, you know?
But she was angry, and I think she's really unstable, and I think her performance since the election has been scandalous.
You realize that something like 56% of all Democrats think the Russians actually got into the voting machines and fiddled with them.
That's the thing that happened.
It's not surprising that guy goes and opens fire on the Congressional Republican baseball team.
They think it was literally stolen.
And she's never been made to be responsible for that.
Anyway, as I say, it's not that Trump isn't as ill, but the country is.
It's in crisis.
Its institutions are buckling under the stress of this irrepressible conflict between the historic American nation on the one hand and what we call anti-America on the other.
You know, the Democratic Coalition, which is fundamentally made up of minorities and immigrants, and which is struggling to take control of the country.
There are two nations warring in the bosom of one state, and the institutions are buckling under the strain.
Plus, you know, Trump really was a revolution.
It was a hostile taker of the party.
He actually tried to placate them after he took over.
That's why he chose Pence as his vice president, which may well prove to be a fatal mistake, because it makes impeachment more attractive to them.
That's why he had Rens Prebuss in there.
But the party is not reconciled to him.
And, of course, above all, there's a hostile takeover of the entire state of the parliament government, which doesn't want to go in the direction which he's talking about in any way.
He wants to continue immigration.
He wants to continue to intervene militarily.
He wants to have it all over the world.
He wants to have free trade, you know.
One thing about Trump, you know, is that his campaign was a high-concept campaign.
There were a lot of ideas in it, actually.
There just weren't ideas that the mainstream media and the ruling class like.
And finally, about why I think he deserves an agritart, is, you know, the President of the United States is an extremely weak office.
It's not like you're the Prime Minister of a parliamentary system.
Where, by definition, you control the legislative branch because you've got control of the executive branch.
That's how you get control of the executive branch, by controlling the legislative branch.
He's not like that at all.
A president can't just snap his fingers and order up bills.
I compared him last year, for those of you who were here, if he's elected to be like King Kong, the curtain goes back and there's King Kong on this stage in this huge iron frame, roaring.
That's what he's like.
But King Kong did eventually break free, of course.
So we really, in the very early stages of judging what his performance is going to be, he's not even staffed up yet.
He's remarkably slow at staffing up.
This is actually good for us at vdare.com because we have a number of people who thought they would be, a number of our writers who thought they'd be in the administration by now.
They're all pseudonymous, by the way, for the benefit of journalists here.
And by and large, they're not in the administration, although nobody else is.
It's not like anybody else has been chosen.
He hasn't chosen anybody.
So eventually, he will choose people, and he'll get the show on the road.
The bad news about Trump is that he's not a professional politician.
That's why we have him putting his foot in his mouth all the time.
But that's the good news, too, because no professional politician would have taken the right risks that he did.
You see this in these attacks on Jeff Sessions.
For any normal politician, it would mean something if he was doing that.
I mean, it's inconceivable that any normal politician would do anything like that, but it would at least mean something.
But in his case, I think he's just blowing off steam.
He's irritated by the situation, so he blows off steam.
He roars.
I think it's quite possible that Sessions is going to be an attorney general for the rest of the administration.
I think.
But Trump has, I must admit, blown off steam about this for a long time.
And there's a reason for this.
This Russian hacking investigation is extremely serious.
You know, maybe Sessions shouldn't have recused himself.
On the other hand, maybe Trump shouldn't have appointed this guy Rosenstein as the second in command.
I can't find out anybody who understands how this happened.
This guy was a career prosecutor, but he's a career prosecutor in the Obama administration.
Very few people.
There were very few holdovers from the Bush administration to the Obama administration.
He was held over in the Obama administration for a reason, which is that he was fulfilling their agenda in Baltimore.
So there's obviously something wrong with him.
That's the weak link.
I don't see why that was done.
However, I must say, I think we should step back from partisan for all here.
And we have to admit that Russian meddling in this election really did go beyond the pale.
There are somewhere between 12 to 20 million illegal Russian immigrants in the country.
The Russians have a score of consulates supporting them.
The Russian government has actually paid for a cell phone app.
To help these Russian legals if they're picked up by ICE.
This is true.
They have done.
Furthermore, Russia's changed its citizenship law.
It's openly calling on its legal immigrants here to be a fifth column, acting in Russia's interests.
They can both be Russian citizens and American citizens.
A Russian president a few years ago spoke to them and said,"You are Russians who live in the U.S." Oh, wait a minute.
I got that wrong.
It's not Russia.
It's Israel.
I mean Mexico.
Oh my God.
Well, obviously, I don't take this Russian stuff seriously.
I think it's quite obvious that increasingly most people don't, even among Democrats.
But I do take the special prosecutor seriously.
The phenomenon of the special prosecutor is like a Frankenstein monster.
It's not constrained by the usual checks and balances.
It's arguably unconstitutional.
In fact, Anthony Scalia made a very powerful argument about it, saying that...
The law has deprived the president of exclusive control of the executive branch.
And he also warned that the law could be abused.
He said, I fear the court has permanently encumbered the republic with an institution that will do it great harm.
That's what's happening.
You know, we already have a prosecutorial abuse scandal problem in this country.
Americans are already in this situation.
Where prosecutors can and do put anyone in jail if they really want to.
The federal government wants to put you in jail, it can.
Craig Roberts, Paul Craig Roberts, who some of you know, wrote a book about this nearly 20 years ago.
Sam Dixon gave an excellent speech, I guess two years ago, about Martha Stewart, who was jailed not for incited trading, but because she lied, quote-unquote, lied to a policeman.
In other words, she foolishly spoke to the...
The investigators without a lawyer and answer questions which they decided to show weren't quite true.
The special prosecutor makes the situation much, much worse.
They have a limitless ambit.
He can go after anything he wants.
He has a limitless budget.
He can subpoena anybody he wants.
It's a walking perjury trap, as Ann Calder called it.
You know, Clinton certainly perjured himself, Bill Clinton.
Over having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky.
But this was actually unearthed by a special prosecutor, Ken Starr, who'd been appointed to look into a completely different scandal, the whitewater real estate speculation, which actually they never found anything wrong in.
But he was rooting around, and eventually he was able to get Clinton under oath on this subject.
So, the Mueller investigation is extremely dangerous for Trump.
It's like a parasite on the president.
It's like a tapeworm or something.
Mueller can harass Trump and his family until he finds something.
Or until he gets something into a perjury trap.
Or until he just gets stuff which he then leaks to the press.
Like Trump's tax returns.
Pat Buchanan has a new book out on the Nixon presidency, which in many ways is extremely instructive if you're thinking about the situation Trump is in.
I wrote a long article about it about a month ago.
This week, Pat said in his column,"Reports of Trump's frustration and rage suggest that he knows he's been maneuvered, partly by his own mistakes, into a kill box from which there may be no bloodless exit." I gather Pat,
in fact, thinks there is no exit, which is quite depressing.
Trump has to get out of this.
There's a huge showdown coming.
I don't know how he's going to do it, but he's got to do it.
So you can expect real drama over that.
But it's important to realise that whether or not Mueller's fired, it's always been the case that the Democrats were going to impeach Trump.
If they got control of the House.
James Fulford wrote an article in April of last year just recounting all the various speculations about how Trump could be impeached that were going around in the left-wing media.
This was before he'd been nominated, let alone elected.
They were planning to impeach him.
They don't need evidence for impeachment.
It's basically like a vote of no confidence.
It's not a judicial proceeding.
Otherwise, Clinton would have been convicted because he was guilty as hell of perjury.
They just decided not to pay attention to it.
And impeachment is not the end of the world.
That's what Clinton proved.
I mean, in Nixon's case, he was persuaded to resign before he was impeached.
They broke his nerve.
But Clinton proved that wasn't necessary.
You know, Nixon could be shamed.
Clinton could not be shamed.
I don't think Donald Trump can be shamed either.
And they need 60 votes in the Senate to convict him.
So, you know, that's what all this ma-ma-wing and yowling and hollering is about.
They're trying to break the GOP will.
And, of course, the GOP is notoriously cowardly.
I do think that...
We think at VDR that demystifying impeachment is a great idea.
There ought to be more impeachments, not fewer impeachments.
It's a way for the democratic process to get control of the judicial branch, which has become intolerable.
It's interesting to me.
I thought that Obama should have been impeached for his two executive amnesties.
applause applause
And we wrote a lot about that.
And even some friends were worried about it because they said, well, it's so far out of the conventional wisdom that it will discredit you, you know, to make this case.
But guess what?
As soon as Obamacare appeared to be in jeopardy, liberals rediscovered the impeachment power.
David Dow, who writes the Daily Beast, proposed impeaching the Supreme Court if they decided the wrong way.
And a law professor called Jonathan Turley actually proposed an FDR-type court packing scheme.
They're allowed to have new ideas.
We're not allowed to have new ideas.
At least, we're not supposed to.
But somebody has to have the new ideas on our side, and I nominate us.
I want to also say that it's obvious in the way Trump has been behaving that he does have beliefs, or at least instincts.
You know, in 2000, when he was running for the reform nomination, he got into, he started to attack Pat Buchanan.
And Trump is the kind of guy who just, if he gets into fire, just picks up the nearest bottle and hits his opponent over the head with it.
So what he did was he accused, he said that Buchanan was obviously a neo-Nazi.
Ironic when you think about the situation now.
Anyway, I don't think it's quite known, but he actually apologized to Pat after the election.
He wrote an election and apologized.
It's the only known case that I'm aware of of Trump apologizing for anything.
Of course, it wasn't in public.
You know, Trump, as you know, was the creature from the TV lagoon.
He had this hit show, The Apprentice.
How many people here watch The Apprentice ever?
Four or five.
Well, what this means is that you're in what Charles Murray calls the upper class, because the top 5% of the population watches no television at all, except Netflix or something.
But the average American watches 35 hours a week.
Can you imagine?
35 hours a week.
And a considerable number of those hours for 10 years was Donald Trump on The Apprentice.
They all know him.
He's been in their living rooms repeatedly.
I actually wrote to Charles Murray, who I've known for some years, and pointed this out.
Did you realize that you anticipated Donald Trump?
And he said, yes, he agrees.
His book, Coming Apart, goes into this in great detail.
He said, yes, yes, that's true, but Trump is awful anyway.
I wrote back to him and said, it's not the messenger, it's the message.
You couldn't have been more of a gentleman and scar than Pap Buchanan was.
Or for that matter, Enoch Powell.
And look what happened to them.
So, I don't agree with More on that.
But I've just learned an interesting thing about this Apprentice show.
There's a book called Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green that's just out, and I've just finished reading it.
And he makes the point that nobody seems to recognize that this show, The Apprentice, apart from its huge success, had 20 million people watching it.
It was extremely popular with minorities, African Americans and Hispanics.
Trump himself was more popular with African-American and Hispanic viewers than he was with whites.
The whites liked him, but not as much as the blacks and Hispanics did.
He had a reason for saying that they loved him.
And this was one reason.
It was such a huge success.
The advertisers have to buy the absolute numbers, but they also know they have to reach these niches, these ethnic niches.
Well, this show did both.
It gave them the absolute numbers and the niches.
So that all by itself should have made him a billionaire.
And what this means is that Trump was the answer to the GOP establishment's prayers.
He could have run as a Republican, appealing to minorities, and advocating...
Bush-type amnesty immigration surge, just like Romney did.
Romney made it very clear, if you read it closely, that he was going to go to comprehensive immigration reform, quote-unquote.
As soon as he got in, he said, we'll do it in the first year.
Nobody paid any attention because the mainstream media wanted to portray him as being an extreme right-winger.
But it was clear that's what he was going to do.
Trump was in a position to do a lot better than Romney with the minorities.
But he didn't do it.
He did exactly the opposite.
He actually started to attack Obama in 2012 over the mysterious question of his origins and his birth certificate, which, for mysterious reasons, he was very reluctant to release.
That actually hurt the apprentice.
It hurt his rating.
It didn't stop him.
And now, of course, this year, this election cycle, he went for patriotic immigration reform.
So that's not something which...
You would normally expect someone in his position to do.
It means that there's something there.
There's instincts.
There's something there.
This transgender ban, which was about the third crisis this week, or was it the second?
You know, it suddenly bans...
That's all about the war.
He apparently...
You know, there is money for the border war in the next spending bill.
It's called a minibus.
But... There's a row broke out because the Conservatives wanted to take out military spending on transgender surgery.
In other words, they didn't want the military to be having to perform these transgender operations on these people they've been forced to take.
And the Democrats, of course, opposed this, and so did a considerable number of Republican wimps.
So the thing was voted through.
Because they were so upset about this that they appealed to Trump for support.
They wanted him to lean on the Republican wimps.
I think we should use this word wimp.
I think the idea that they're moderates is quite wrong.
To get them to change their minds.
Trump's response to this was to ban transgenders from military service altogether.
Somebody said,
Somebody said, we asked him to light a candle, and he firebombed the table.
Now, of course, Trump is right on the merits.
The military bars all kinds of people because of pre-existing conditions, your flat feet, all this kind of thing.
I know somebody who was just rejected by the Air Force because he's been on antidepressants within the last year.
And the minute fraction of the population that thinks it's been born with the wrong sex has much more serious problems than depression.
They're just not a risk that any rational businessman would take.
Remember, Trump has shown that he's not interested in the gay, homosexual aspects of the culture war.
Peter Thiel was openly gay speaker at his convention.
He was photographed waving this rainbow flag, all this stuff.
Didn't do any good, of course, but he's made it clear that he's not interested in these issues.
That's not why he did this.
It's not because he thinks transgenders are problematic.
He did it because he wants that wall.
He can only get this bill if this problem of military surgery is solved, and he wants the wall, which is in the bill.
Now, the left knows this.
When I was driving, we were driving on a terminal drive yesterday to get here.
By God, we really do need infrastructure, new infrastructure in this country.
More three-lane highways, you know.
Anyway, I read this by Matt Iglesias, who is a real immigration no-goodnik, on the White House shake-up.
He said, Iglesias said, quote, Trump really likes the immigration issue.
Whether you agree with the policy direction or not, One thing you can say for DHS under Kelly is that he's accomplished what Trump set out to accomplish.
Immigration enforcement has become harsher.
Central Americans appear to be more reluctant to seek refuge in the U.S. Long-time undocumented residents have become more fearful.
And things are more or less going according to plan.
So they know that, what Trump was doing here.
He went on.
GOP legislative agenda now in disarray, and it is the GOP's legislative agenda.
He's done what they want him to do.
They want him to do health care and taxes, and he's chosen to do that instead of immigration reform, which is what he should have done.
Anyway, with this agenda in disarray, Trump is returning to the rhetorical tropes of anti-immigrant fear that won him the nomination and empowering a competent ex-general who's helped him translate those fears into policy.
I mean, that sounds very good to me.
There's also another writer there, Dara Lind, who, you know, Trump yesterday spoke in Long Island about the MS-13 gang.
The headline she had on her post, which went up last night, was, Trump just delivered the most chilling speech of his presidency.
The President of the United States is explicitly encouraging police violence.
And she went on, six months into the presidency, Trump's already established a pattern.
When his agenda is floundering, he returns to themes that first made him a popular figure.
She calls it the theme of scary immigrant criminals.
It's an opportunity for him to brag with some basis in reality about how much he's accomplished as president, since his administration really has been able to make strides in expanding enforcement.
Again, this is from the perspective of the left.
It's dangerous because at least...
At best, it successfully communicates to law enforcement agents that their moral superiority to the animals they apprehend justifies or even mandates violence.
At worst, it communicates that message more broadly to the most fervent of the white supremacists who weren't number among the president's supporters.
She's talking about us.
She goes on,"Either way, it sends a clear message to Latinos in America, both unauthorized immigrants, i.e., illegal immigrants, who are liable to be arrested by ICE at any time and might be falsely accused of gang membership in the process, and legal immigrants and citizens who nonetheless might look like a gang member to the wrong person based on the color of their skin." Now,
at this point, I should interject and say that when there are 11 to 20 million illegal English immigrants in this country, I will have no objection to showing the law enforcement people my papers.
Then she goes on.
Trump is telling them, that is to say, the illegal immigrants, there is no one who can keep them safe.
And his audience, who are all law enforcement professionals, greeted his message with thunderous applause.
So they know what's happening.
Even if we sometimes lose track of it.
You know, immigration is the sword of Trumpocles hanging over American politics.
Because although the president can't just snap his fingers and have legislation ordered up, there's actually quite a lot of legislation in the pipeline.
And litigation.
You know, when Obama had...
He had two amnesties.
One was DACA, supposedly for children, 16 to 30. And one was DAPA, which was their parents.
DAPA was much...
DACA was deferred...
I should spell the names out.
DACA was Deferred Action for Children and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans.
Both of these were legislative amnesties, were executive branch amnesties.
And, of course, both of them deserve merited impeachment.
But what actually happened was...
And, of course, the Congressional Republicans should have stopped it.
They should have either impeached him, or they should have denied him funds, or they should have denied him nominations.
For example, if he had the perfect opportunity to stop the new attorneys, the one who, Lawrence Lynch, from being appointed, they could have stopped that.
They could have, but they didn't.
But nevertheless, Dapper, with a P, is dead.
And the reason it's dead is that the state of Texas sued and a judge in Texas put on hold.
And the Obama administration appealed to the Supreme Court.
It was a 4-4 tie.
That meant that the law court decision held and Dapper's dead because Sessions has refused to litigate any further.
He agrees it's unconstitutional.
Now, as I get the same thing, it's true with DACA.
Texas said it's about to sue.
And there are rumors that Sessions won't make any effort at all to defend it, not even in the district court.
It crosses my mind that the reason why Trump didn't immediately end DACA, because it's a rolling amnesty.
It's got to be renewed every two years.
He didn't do that.
It's because he knows the courts are going to do it for him.
It's a somewhat uncharacteristically cowardly way of doing it, but it is how Obama sabotages the Defense of Marriage Act.
They just declined to defend it.
Anyway, it looks like DACA, with any luck, is dead.
But there's lots of other legislation.
There's an Interior Enforcement Bill called Davis-Oliver.
Which could be in the House in August.
Two pieces of that bill have already passed the House, tidying up sanctuary sitters and Kate's Law, which basically is an attack on illegals who've been deported several times.
They're actually at Senator McConnell's desk right now.
He hasn't let them go to committee.
The idea is he could bring them up any day.
He could bring them up on Monday.
The Senate's in session on Monday.
He could do it then.
Even more dramatically, Senator Cotner and Senator Perdue have what they call a Rays Act.
Which halves legal immigration.
And they have an alcohol raise 2.0.
It's not out yet, but they're still working on it.
And that doesn't just half legal immigration, but it shifts to a merit-based system.
The president has repeatedly said he's in favor of this.
He said this in a speech he gave the State of the Union address, or whatever it was, in February.
And he said it in Ohio just a couple of days ago.
So if that bill comes out and he gets stuck into it, things could change very rapidly.
There's a refugee bill which is going to make improvements in the refugee statute.
Of course, the refugee statute should be abolished, but there's at least something.
And there's e-verify legislation.
The most important thing is...
Have I really gone on that long?
Oh, my.
Sorry. Well, I mean, we're not going anywhere, are we?
Okay, the most important thing is he gets to set the new refugee quota in September.
He should set it at zero.
The president has the right to do that.
should do to me too.
Thank you.
A set, perhaps, for a few thousand white South Africans.
He can do that too, by the way, to specify that.
Now, I'm going to go back to...
Actually, at the end, you know, Jared.
I'm going to go back to the Port Horace's.
Norman's wife, Midge Dector, was a long-time friend, and she's actually responsible for Lydia and I meeting.
I met my second wife because she was chairman of the Philadelphia Society, and she invited me to speak there on immigration, and there was Lydia in the front row.
Well, some years ago, I was discussing some issue with her and she came up with a great phrase about this hypothetical issue.
She said,"We should have such problems." Well, with Trump, we do have such problems.
Thank God.
Thank you.
Thank you.
No questions?
Take some questions, Peter.
questions.
Hi. I want your feedback.
I wonder whether Trump's being strategic or cowardly.
From a culturist point of view, for example, the Muslim ban, it's not a Muslim ban.
It's only these five countries.
To me, he's just abdicated.
Any culturist consciousness.
When he talks about crime in the inner city, he talks about jobs.
He never talks about the pathological thug culture.
When he talks about immigration, He talks about the wall, but does he talk about they don't speak English, they have a totally different culture, we have a culture, we've got to defend it?
To me, he's sort of absent on a lot of things, but maybe he's just being strategic.
Honestly, I think you're overanalyzing him.
I think he says to his officials, do something about such a thing.
And they try to do it, and being lawyers, they try to do it in the most cautious way.
In many cases, they don't try to do it, because the administration is infested with Obama hanging holdovers, and career civil servants who are working there, filling posts that political appointees should have.
So I just think you've got to take a long view on this.
There's no doubt that he's slowly turning the ship.
They set that Muslim ban that way to make it irreproachable in court.
But it turned out it didn't matter because the judge in Hawaii simply ignored all that and said,"You're a nasty man who has animus against Muslims and therefore nothing you do is going to be acceptable to me." Of course, this is a crazy position.
He should be impeached.
I wouldn't worry about it too much.
As I said in the speech, I think his instincts are very, very sound.
He just has to get control of the government and he's nowhere near doing that yet.
I know you.
I'm doing very well.
I'll be very quick.
What do you think about a merit-based immigration system?
I, just speaking for myself, I'm actually quite opposed to this idea.
It seems...
Perhaps even worse than what we have, the idea that we would bring in millions of high IQ people who would decimate these jobs that we want white people to have.
I mean, I think that we need a much bigger paradigm change in just saying, let's bring in smart people.
I mean, there are a billion and two...
Chinese people, there's probably, I could do the math on an envelope, but there's hundreds of millions of Asians with IQs in the 115 range who could be doing coding and programming and secretarial.
It seems like we really need to shift the paradigm.
This idea that a merit-based system is a step forward, I see the merit-based system as a very bad thing.
Actually, not at all protecting American workers.
You know, as you know, Powell said about immigration, numbers are of the essence.
If you get the numbers down low enough, all the problems go away.
It is true that having merit-based immigration has a tendency to mean that immigrants don't go on welfare and become public charges as much.
On the other hand, it's also true, as you say, that it can lead to displacement.
I mean, if you look at the Ivy League at the moment, I mean, it's basically Jews and Chinese there, as far as I can see.
There aren't any founding stock Americans in those universities.
So it has impact that way.
And I think that's been a problem for the Australians in particular.
Their system is fairly selective in terms of merit, but the result is that there's a lot of crowding out at the top.
As I say, the issue is numbers.
Get the numbers down.
This young man I met is far more right-wing than I am.
I've just been talking with him before, so this is the future.
Please come ask a question.
Great speech.
I'm just really confused, and I'm sure a lot of people in the audience are as well, is that when you hear Trump in his usual day-to-day communications, he says things that make him sound like a civic nationalist,
and I think that's what we all think that's what he is.
But some of the things that he says and some of the things that he implies that during the election were brought up, such as Make America great again.
Okay, so when was it great again?
That almost begs a question.
And like, America first.
I'm sure we all know the origin of that.
And just countless examples of that nature.
I mean, is he, and I'm on your opinion, is he deep down agree?
Or is it like a subconscious thing where perhaps he does agree in the back of his head, but he doesn't want to admit it?
You know, I think it would be very hard for somebody to spend the formative years in America before the 1965 Immigration Act kicked in.
and not remember that America with great fondness.
So it would surprise me if he didn't have some sense of it.
It is true that he's never said anything other than purely a civic nationalist.
But the fact that he's raised the issue at all strikes me...
I mean, there's a certain amount of opportunism in it.
I mean, he had the sense to see it was a really important political issue, which nobody else apparently did, all these professional politicians and so on.
But also, the way he's stuck with it says to me that there's something more than...
there's something deeper there.
But whether it's coherent or thought out...
Well, it's not current and thought out by definition.
It's Donald Trump.
How close the service is, you know, goodness knows.
It's a mystery to me.
It's a mystery to me.
The only reason why I bring it up is because it's very confusing to me.
Because you mentioned how he could have ran as a Jeb Bush and he would have faced much less opposition.
So it goes against his self-interest to do something where, you know, he probably just wanted to be elected president and get the prestige and maybe...
Not have to attach this baggage to him.
I mean, he's surrounded in Manhattan by ultra liberals and immigration enthusiasts.
And he's worked all his life with them.
And somehow, they probably didn't sense that this was an issue for him, but it was.
And it goes back a long way.
I mean, he spoke at CPAC on the question at least five or six years ago.
So, you know, he's a real study.
But nevertheless, I'm glad we have him.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi. My question is, do you think that Trump will build the wall, and does it need to be built in order for him to be re-elected?
Taking them in reverse order, it doesn't need to be built in order for him to be re-elected.
He just has to do something to mobilize the white vote.
And that happens to be a very useful way to do it.
I do think he will build the wall.
At least there's going to be a lot more wall there by the time he has to run than there is now.
There's apparently much more going on than people realize in terms of the planning and so on.
And as I say, he did intervene this week to defend because he was interested in getting that wall funding in there.
So I do expect the wall.
I think the wall is a fundamentalist symbolic issue.
What I'm really interested in is interior enforcement.
And that's in some ways easy to do.
The problem is the Democrats themselves are set against this wall now.
It's become a point of honor with them.
But I think they'll be crushed.
I think they'll find it very difficult.
They're not going to win back the white working class by taking that stand.
Peter, in reference to that previous question, just before this gentleman, I was in the audience when Ann Coulter spoke at a social contract conference, and I asked her if she would elaborate a little bit on the story about Trump reading her book.
And she went into some detail about some staffer seeing her being interviewed, I believe it was by an Hispanic activist somewhere, and got the book, and I don't know whether Trump read it or not, but there's the influence somehow.
Can you elaborate on that?
Of course, I know Ann Coulter has referenced you as enlightening her on the issue.
Could you speak to those two issues?
So it was you who asked that question, Tom.
I was there.
I don't think Trump reads anything.
I don't say this critically.
I mean, I was in financial journalism for 40 years, and the character type of the plutocrat are not people who can't sit still long enough to read.
He might possibly be able to listen to an audio tape or something while he's playing golf or something.
But there's no doubt that something in that vote got to him.
Because the way his speech was set up, his announcement speech, you know, went to the question of Hispanic crime, specifically rape.
And Anne's book is a very powerful statement of the fact that, you know, crime in this country is ethnically variegated.
There's ethnic specialization in crime.
And Hispanics do specialize in rape, particularly of children.
They're very prone to it, compared to other groups.
And that doesn't strike, to me, Trump could not have got that idea from reading the mainstream media or talking to his friends in Manhattan.
So that tells me that he read something.
Maybe it's on the back cover or something.
I think there's no doubt that Ann's book did have a big influence on it.
And if he'd had any sense, of course, he would have weighed it around more, because all the questions that had been asked were answered in that book.
He didn't make the use of it that he should have done.
▲
Export Selection