Commentary
For the past week, I’ve watched in amazement as a huge victory for President Donald Trump has been spun by many as a massive defeat.
On July 11, the president appeared at a White House press conference with Attorney General William Barr to deliver some very important news on immigration. The two men jointly announced that since there’s no longer enough time to place the controversial citizenship question on the 2020 Census—given the time it would take to navigate the legal challenges—Trump will instead use an executive order to require all federal agencies to share their data on citizens and non-citizens with the Commerce Department.
Immediately following the president’s statements, the usual doom-criers in conservative media filled the airwaves with cries of “cave” and “sell-out” and “failure.” Meanwhile, social media accounts that purport to be Trump-friendly spent days “explaining” how Trump has yet again betrayed or failed his base.
They must have watched a different press conference than the one I did.
I’m not the only one to figure out how Trump has expertly played the Democrats in the past week. Andrew Malcolm wrote an excellent op-ed at McClatchy spelling out how Trump’s strategy has left him in a stronger position, while leaving the Democrats totally exposed on the immigration issue. Malcolm wrote the article after advance leaks had Democrats and the media celebrating, because Trump supposedly had given up the fight:
“Trump, in fact, took the citizenship issue to a whole new front — one that only he controls through the federal bureaucracy.
“He signed one of his favored executive orders erasing data-sharing obstacles between departments, including Defense and Homeland Security, and compelling all to cooperate with the Census Bureau on estimating citizenship.
“Trump called this data vital to design sound public policies in health care, civil rights, education, and immigration. ‘We must have a reliable count of how many citizens, non-citizens, and illegal aliens are in our country,’ the president declared.
“Recent polls indicate 60 percent of Americans actually agree with Trump.
“Of course, he also slipped in a political shot: ‘As shocking as it may be, far-left Democrats in our country are determined to conceal the number of illegal aliens in our midst. They probably know the number is far greater, much higher than anyone would have believed before.’”
Those who think Trump is losing the immigration fight completely ignore what Trump and Barr actually said at that press conference.
Barr patiently explained there was no time left to put a citizenship question into the 2020 census form. Here’s how he quite succinctly explained it:
