Donald Trump’s fiery immigration speech last week left his supporters trying to smooth things over while cementing opposition from Republicans already vowing to oppose him.
Rudy Giuliani, who has emerged as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, argued Sunday that Trump’s “point got lost in the emotion of the moment.”
“It’s going to depend on the person,” Giuliani said on CNN’s “State of the Union” when asked about Trump’s promises to crack down on illegal immigrants, during a speech in Phoenix on Wednesday.
“Some of these people have been on welfare the last 30 years, maybe some of them have to be thrown out, but not necessarily all of them,” Giuliani said.
Yet that’s not what many people took away from Trump’s speech, in which the Republican presidential nominee said that “anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation” and vowed to especially crack down on illegal immigrants who have committed other crimes.
Arizona Republican Sen. Jake Flake said the controversial address reinforced his resolve not to vote for Trump — and predicted that Trump’s remarks about immigration could cause him to lose Arizona to Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, even though Arizona typically goes for the GOP.
It’s not “comfortable” to not support his party’s nominee, Flake acknowledged, but he “simply can’t” given the tenor of Trump’s campaign.
Asked by host Jake Tapper about whether Trump included some nuances about how he would treat certain illegal immigrants, as Giuliani suggested, Flake said he didn’t hear any “missed point.”
“If it was there, it was pretty deep,” Flake said.
The Republican National Committee was preparing to praise Trump’s immigration speech, but later scrapped that plan and made no statement about the speech at all, according to a report by the New York Times.
Yet Tapper noted that past candidates have also used some strong language calling for deporting illegal immigrants, running during his show a 1995 clip of President Bill Clinton calling for “illegal aliens” to be deported.
Tapper asked Labor Secretary Tom Perez, an Obama appointee and supporter for Clinton, to explain how Clinton’s rhetoric was different than Trump’s.
Perez responded that Trump would seek to deport the children of undocumented parents, even if they’d been born in the U.S.
“Donald Trump believes you can’t do anything in this country, basically, if you’re an undocumented immigrant,” Perez said.
