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I addressed this in the post. To summarize, yes, he could fix it now, to at least some degree. Reimplementing the Remain in Mexico would help. The problem with all of these fixes though is that they're bandaids on bullet holes that don't address fundamental issues like this bill would have.
His hawkishness was specifically a reference to this chart. Yes, Obama was also more willing to give amnesty than Republicans ever were.
Multiple people referenced the exact same remark shortly after the meeting was over, so I think it's safe to assume he really said it. If you want to keep contesting that specific statement, just choose any of his other ones. His hostile rhetoric towards immigrants wasn't exactly a secret.
The overarching point on Trump was that his policies were bombastic and good at catching headlines, but that they didn't do much in practice. Comparing the number of illegal immigrant border encounters during Trump's term and Obama's second term is quite similar. Biden was worse than both of them because he tried to go back to Obama's policies, but by then the asylum loophole was well known.
I can grant that in a theoretical alternate universe where Trump didn't do anything on the border, immigration could have surged far worse than it did due to exogenous factors and immigrants catching on to the loophole faster, so Trump's actions might have stopped a surge that would have happened. It's tough to know for sure, but it's plausible.
Multiple senators such as Tillis said this was the reason. Trump himself motioned at the idea on Truth Social when he said he didn't want to "absolve" the Democrats on the issue.
Can it the personal attacks. I enjoy debating people who disagree with me because I think it makes my arguments stronger, but I've had problems in the past with you reverting to personal attacks.
The Biden administration themselves are the people who built the networks that tell immigrants about the asylum loophole. All those organization and NGOs organize this are Biden aligned groups.
And had the bill passed they'd be telling immigrants to claim they were waterboarded, since it is a form of torture that leave no physical evidence on the victim, for which they'd qualify to remain in country.
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But it can't be a PR strategy if it was said in private and not meant to be publicized.
PR doesn't end with just public facing statements. For example, if an organization is established to help the poor but all the workers openly hate poor people, that's a PR issue since news organizations or even just the poor people themselves would eventually realize how much the organization loathed them.
And again, Trump's loathing of illegal immigrants has never been a secret by any means.
It's in the name: Public Relations. Your argument is that Trump's PR was too mean, and damaged the cause of immigration restriction. But when pushed on this you fall back to claiming that Trump hated illegal immigrants. What's the point of blaming his PR then? If Trump hates immigrants, it doesn't matter what his PR is, because by your logic he would still have hurt the cause just by being Trump.
You really seem to want to catch me with supposed double-binds and contradictions instead of actually addressing important points.
If the contradictions are true, then fair enough. Like earlier when you mentioned "hey you say Trump's restrictions didn't do much, but then say that illegal immigration exploded when Biden removed them". I could certainly see why someone would think that was a bit weird so a clarification was justified, and even with that clarification I probably wasn't giving Trump enough credit to what might have happened if he didn't do his EO's.
But this is just a nothingburger. I feel like I'm reading the following: "first you said 'immigration', then fell back to 'illegal immigration'. Aha! A concession! Then you said Trump had bad PR because of saying stuff like 'shithole countries', but he didn't say that in a televised address, meaning it wasn't public, yet PR has the word 'public' in it. A contradiction!"
To the object-level claim here, if Trump says something inflammatory to a group who all then promptly leak it to the press, then yes, that's a PR problem. The two options Trump has are either 1) get his leaky ship in order, or 2) think it but don't say it, or at least say it in ways that aren't so clearly controversial. Every time you hear the media complaining about "dogwhistling", it's just Republicans doing this. But Trump never seem to get the memo, which is why he keeps shooting himself and the cause of immigration restrictions in the foot.
You want to claim that Trump had bad PR, using as an example something that was leaked from a private meeting, assuming he even said it. Trump's PR is bad because of things other people said about him? This is like saying Biden's PR is bad because of "Let's Go Brandon".
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You talked about it, but that doesn't really address it: If illegal immigration got worse after Biden undid Trump's policies (which is Trump's fault because his PR was mean), why can't Biden just redo them? Why are they bandaids? According to your line of argument: Trump's policies, which didn't do anything, and don't work, prevented the Biden mass influx of immigration, which can't be stopped, unless we adopt some new Biden policies (like building a wall). Mhmmm.
Illegal immigrants!
It is also just absurd. So Biden won’t take steps to partially solve a problem because he wants a bigger solution (even though Biden made the problem worse) but the Republicans are stupid for not taking a solution that OP believes will partially solve a problem because Republicans think it will get them a better solution later on?
Who, whom indeed.
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Fairly sure you are technically wrong on “illegals immigrants”. Being intellectually honest when these debates were going on the asylum seekers are “legal”. They are allowed to claim asylum without proof but that status makes them legally allowed to be in the U.S.
But I too just call them illegals immigrants for dramatic effect. But the Biden administration has in fact found a way to make them “legal”. It’s embarrassing that illegal is technically wrong.
Read the Trump comments in the piece Ben linked. They were all Trump remarks clearly about illegals. Ben claims Trump was too mean to immigrants, eliding the difference.
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Again, he could redo them. He could (and should) reimplement Remain in Mexico to at least reduce the current surge somewhat.
But they're mere bandaids because they don't address the root issues, the most major one being the asylum loophole. The best long term fix would be to remove the asylum loophole, which Trump tried to do but failed since he wasn't willing to do more than executive orders on immigration. Remain in Mexico would be better than the status quo, but it would still be subject to periodic legal challenges, as well as Mexico deciding they don't want to keep all these people and helping them enter the US.
Sure, illegal immigrants. The point is that calling them things like "animals", or saying they're "coming from shithole countries" is needlessly inflammatory if the goal is to pass substantive policy.
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