The Daily Beast is predicting Donald Trump’s supporters won’t react well to his wife on the campaign trail, labeling his supporters as “anti-immigrant.”
The story notes that Trump’s wife Melania is expected to join him on the campaign trail and goes on to suggest that Trump supporters might not receive her well because she is an immigrant, attempting to lump legal and illegal immigrants under the same category in order to paint all Trump supporters as collectively “anti-immigrant.”
It’s not the first time The Daily Beast has attempted to trash GOP frontrunner Donald Trump. It filed a false rape story in July.
Trump has vowed to build a wall along the southern border and crack down on illegal immigration. He also has suggested tightening legal immigration to ensure American jobs are not lost to foreign workers. Melania – who immigrated to the United States from Slovenia legally – is also contributing to the country through charity work and several of her own business ventures.
Breitbart News questioned three experts on immigration about their thoughts on the Daily Beast’s story and prediction.
None agreed with the Daily Beast’s analysis.
Mark Krikorian, President of the Center for Immigration Studies, didn’t understand the connection being drawn between Trump’s wife and federal immigration policies.
“It’s not clear why anyone would try to make a connection between Trump’s wife and his stance on the federal government’s immigration policies. His wife is a legal immigrant who’s now a naturalized citizen — there are several million Americans with foreign-born spouses, and the unlimited immigration of spouses of U.S. citizens has always been permitted, even during the immigration pause starting in the 1920s,” Krikorian explained.
He added, “The imputation is that concern over uncontrolled illegal immigration and excessively high levels of legal immigration is somehow anti-immigrant, which is nonsense.”
Krikorian said that immigrants consist of both good and bad people.
“The problem is the federal government’s immigration program, which needs to be downsized and cleaned up, just like a lot of other federal government programs,” he sated.
Krikorian joked, “Frankly, I think a supermodel wife, who’s been in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, might be, you know, an asset on the campaign trail.”
Roy Beck is president of NumbersUSA, a non-partisan network of more than three million citizens seeking overall immigration reductions. Like Krikorian, he also disagreed with the Daily Beast story.
Beck said the sub-head of the Daily Beast story: “Will the Donald’s anti-immigration supporters cotton to his glamorous, Slovenian-born wife Melania” mislabeled and insulted Trump supporters.
“Nearly every voter who supports reductions in annual legal immigration numbers — as Trump and several other candidates are suggesting — also supports the ability of U.S. citizens to marry people from other countries,” Beck told Breitbart News. “These candidates and their supporters don’t dislike legal immigrants and they don’t oppose immigration, they just want less of it.
Third to criticize the Daily Beast was Americans for Limited Government President Richard Manning.
He told Breitbart News: “The American public doesn’t give a rats patootie about where Donald Trump’s wife was born, and anyone who thinks this might be a sticking point for his campaign clearly doesn’t understand the Trump phenomenon.”
Manning added that spouses don’t usually have a crucial impact on a campaign, with the exception to possibly Hillary Clinton and how she handled her husband’s infidelity.
“The last time a candidate’s spouse mattered in the presidential decision was when Hillary stood by her man in the Democratic primary of 1992 after his many infidelities came to light,” Manning stated. “In 2016, the only spouse who truly matters is Hillary’s husband, who has all the charm that his wife lacks and is arguably the only reason anyone still takes the ethically challenged former Secretary of State seriously.”