Pivot!
As Commentarion NewishLawyer notes, Trump’s speech on immigration was exactly what everyone expected, or should have expected, despite the repeated cries of PIVOT!
However absurd and dishonest Donald Trump’s substance-less faux-pivot of the last several weeks was, it operated with a certain subconscious effectiveness on regular Trump-watchers. Maybe new campaign manager Kellyanne Conway really was making a difference. Maybe Trump really was changing his rhetoric, if not his heart. But after Wednesday night’s loud, angry, and hateful speech on immigration, it should be impossible to view him as anything but a demagogue.
Regular Trump watcher must be a nice way to describe people who are paid to tell other people that they’re watching a horse race, even though one horse is running along the track and the other is rampaging through the stands, kicking and biting spectators.
For everyone else, the shock that Trump’s pivot involved behaving himself while in Mexico then scuttling back home and shouting threats can best be described as non-existent.
The Republican presidential nominee on Wednesday re-upped the harsh immigration rhetoric that electrified his primary campaign, vowing “no amnesty” for undocumented migrants living in the United States and promising to build a “beautiful” and “impenetrable” border wall that Mexico would pay for – hours after that country’s president vowed that it wouldn’t.
[…]
“This is it. We won’t get another opportunity – it will be too late,” he said in a speech that recreated the vision of a dystopian, crime-riddled nation on the edge of an existential crisis that he deployed in his convention speech in Cleveland in July.
There are details at both links. There’s nothing new under that particular sun, but I imagine speculation about the pivot that wasn’t and whether it really was a pivot and if not why, will keep the press occupied for a couple of weeks.