Photograph Source: Wiki Commons – CC BY-SA 3.0
On March 15, 2013, an aspiring politician took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and proposed an immigration reform more radical and left-wing than anything ever enacted in America. He called for total amnesty and citizenship for all 11+ million illegal immigrants in the US, declaring that “you’re going to have to do what’s right.” And then he urged dramatically expanding legal immigration by millions to add even more citizens. His name: Donald J. Trump.
Two years later, Trump descended the escalator at Trump Tower and launched one of the most virulent anti-immigrant campaigns in American political history, delivering a speech that declared Mexico was sending rapists to the US. No president has ever flip-flopped so dramatically on immigration.
The story of how Donald Trump became a xenophobe reveals how a bigoted con artist joined forces with far right racist anti-immigration radicals and convinced the American people that he had an easy solution to immigration.
It’s no exaggeration to call immigration the cardinal issue of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Building a wall, and making Mexico pay for it, became one of the most famous campaign promises ever made in a presidential election. But this wasn’t the first flip-flop on immigration of Trump’s political career.
For most of his life, Trump showed no indication of caring at all about immigration. Trump was full of political opinions on other issues (in 1989, he launched his political ambitions by running full-page ads against the Central Park Five who were later exonerated for rape, declaring “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!“). But immigration was rarely mentioned by Trump for the vast majority of his life.
In 1999, Trump launched his first serious effort to become president as a candidate for the Reform Party, and he denounced his main opponent, Pat Buchanan, for being anti-immigrant: “he attacks gays, immigrants, welfare recipients, even Zulus. When cornered, he says he’s misunderstood. But the fact is that he has a dead serious purpose, and one purpose only: To gain political power. That makes him a very dangerous man.” In reality, that description never applied to an ideologue like Buchanan. But it perfectly described Trump himself.