“I will immediately terminate President Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration. Immediately.” That was Donald Trump speaking on the day he launched his presidential campaign: June 16, 2015. The executive order he was referencing was the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. It allowed the children of undocumented workers to remain in the United States since they had come here through no intention of their own. A year later, as the GOP nominee, Trump hadn’t backed down: “We will immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties, in which he defied federal law and the Constitution to give amnesty to approximately five million illegal immigrants.”
The second of those two orders, a 2014 expansion of DACA, was blocked by the courts. But the first wasn’t terminated on January 20 when Trump became president, and it hasn’t been terminated in the eight months since. And it appears it won’t ever be terminated. On September 13, the president met with House and Senate leaders and struck some sort of agreement with Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. “We had a very productive meeting at the White House with the president,” the Democrats said in a joint statement after the meeting. “We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides.”
Excluding the wall? On its face, that looks like two crucial campaign promises broken: the rescission of DACA and the construction of a wall along our border with Mexico.
The White House doesn’t accept that interpretation. Asked about the Schumer-Pelosi statement the next morning, the president said “the wall will come later.” Asked about DACA, he insisted nobody’s talking about “citizenship” or “amnesty”: “We are not looking at citizenship. We are not looking at amnesty,” he said. “We are looking at allowing people to stay here. We are working with everybody.” And the wall? “If we don’t have the wall,” he said, “we are doing nothing.”
It now seems pretty clear: DACA will not be terminated but codified, and Trump’s strategy on border security is to make deals with a party implacably opposed to all of his campaign promises.
Strictly as a matter of governing, the president’s moves strike us as pragmatic and defensible. Many a responsible leader would make the same move in a similar situation. The wall was an impractical idea to begin with—a campaign metaphor that somehow transmogrified into a literal policy proposal. And no American president was ever going to round up people who’d grown up here and deport them to places they knew little or nothing about. Even some immigration hawks don’t favor that approach.
So it appears we have an altogether practical president ready to strike a deal, any deal, even if it means dropping fundamental campaign pledges. That sounds an awful lot like the sort of politician Trump supporters were sick of—the sort that makes extraordinary promises, quietly drops them once in government, and blames everybody else for his failure.
We make no complaint on policy grounds; not in this instance, anyway. But if we had to have a president in the usual promise-making, promise-breaking tradition, we would have preferred one sans all the managerial incompetence and wild infantile blustering.
Trump’s most fervent supporters—including several prominent entertainment-conservatives—insisted that it didn’t much matter whether he was a conservative or not. What mattered is that he would be a different kind of president, one who would “fight.” That was enough.
We suspect these members of the Trump personality cult would support him even if he pushed for single-payer health care and negotiations with al Qaeda. The question is how will those who took Trump’s campaign promises literally respond? We suspect that some of them will terminate their support. Immediately.
