Trump for Dummies

Hello and welcome to the Donald J. Trump School of Politics and Public Policy! Always bear in mind the key insight of Mr Trump’s mentor, the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn: “I bring out the worst in my enemies, and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” Mr Trump’s opponents forgot or ignored that the previous “largest deportation program of criminals” was carried out by President Barack Obama; that every president since Bill Clinton deployed the military to the border; that not long ago the pro-labour left resisted even legal immigration while the conservative editorial board of the Wall Street Journal wanted open borders. This nursery-school dialectic accounts for Mr Trump’s greatest triumph with the Method: President Biden’s shocking neglect of illegal immigration until, politically, it was too late. A classic demonstration came on December 8th, 2024, when Mr Trump appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and, in his application of TM™, achieved a two-fer: claiming simultaneous success for his tariff and immigration policies without having done anything but make a bit more noise. Cynics argue Eric Adams, New York’s mayor, panted to meet with the “border tsar”, Tom Homan, because Mr Adams was angling for a pardon.