Tuesday during a monologue on his Fox News Channel show, host Tucker Carlson criticized President Donald Trump for what seemed to be a different approach to how to handle immigration in a meeting that aired to the public with a bipartisan group of congressional leaders on the issue.
Carlson questioned that approach, which was apparently much softer on the issue than what he had run on during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Partial transcript as follows:
In 2016, Donald Trump ran on the premise that America’s borders ought to be real. That the repeated amnesties of the past have betrayed voters and that this country deserves immigration policy that looks out for American interests rather than those of foreign countries. Almost nobody in Washington agreed with him at the time. Almost nobody in Washington agrees with him now.
Congress is full of people from both parties who believe that the point of our immigration policy is to provide cheap labor to their donors and to atone for America’s imaginary sins against the world. They couldn’t care less about immigration’s effect on you or your family. Yet, these are the same people the president now says he trusts to write the immigration bills — the one he will sign no matter what it says. So, what was the point of running for president?
You will remember the president also ran on his skills as a negotiator and he clearly has skills as a negotiator. Where were they today? The president signaled he’d be happy to legalize hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants now and that at some point in the future tackle all that other stuff like making sure they can’t bring millions of their relatives from the Third World along with them. That’s not much of a negotiation.
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