Okay, this comes from Buzzfeed - ye hast been warned - but after chewing it over, I took it seriously, as a serious telegraphing of what Mr. Trump plans for the general election.
Donald Trump Secretly Told The New York Times What He Really Thinks About Immigration
The New York Times is sitting on an audio recording that some of its staff believes could deal a serious blow to Donald Trump, who, in an off-the-record meeting with the newspaper, called into question whether he would stand by his own immigration views.
Trump visited the paper’s Manhattan headquarters on Tuesday, Jan. 5, as part of a round of editorial board meetings that — as is traditional — the Democratic candidates for president and some of the Republicans attended. The meetings, conducted partly on the record and partly off the record in a 13th-floor conference room, give candidates a chance to make their pitch for the paper’s endorsement....
On Saturday, columnist Gail Collins, one of the attendees at the meeting (which also included editor-in-chief Dean Baquet), floated a bit of speculation in her column:
The most optimistic analysis of Trump as a presidential candidate is that he just doesn’t believe in positions, except the ones you adopt for strategic purposes when you’re making a deal. So you obviously can’t explain how you’re going to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, because it’s going to be the first bid in some future monster negotiation session.
Sources familiar with the recording and transcript — which have reached near-mythical status at the Times — tell me that the second sentence is a bit more than speculation. It reflects, instead, something Trump said about the flexibility of his hardline anti-immigration stance.... Here's how I read it:
- Mr. Trump is thinking ahead towards the general election - specifically, the attack ads that will come from the Dems. After all, how would it hurt him if the unpublished part of the tapes take a walk from the Times building to the DNC? What are they going to do - put out an ad that contains the "shocking" disclosure that Mr. Trump is more reasonable than their own attack ads will say he is? Sure, they could hold it up as evidence that he's a flip-flopper - but that move comes at the risk of making the Dems themselves look like they're all over the map. Donald Trump can get away with that image. The Dems can't.
- Even if the New York Times - DNC "symlink"
doesn't kick in, Mr. Trump can ask the paper to release the entire transcript once the Dem attack ads start flying - and use it to knock them down. - With regard to the primaries, he saying what he said implies that he's fully confident he'll win the Republican nom no matter what. As a businessman, he'll see winning the nomination as a done deal placing him in charge. Those unreleased tapes do show that he's prepared to follow the old "pivot to the centre" rule.
I realize that some Trmpbois will take this analysis as evidence that Mr. Trump is playing hyper-dimensional chess
, but it's not that hard to understand. A lot of his supposed vagueness can be explained by his "Trump Card"
Maximize Your Options. Just read, understand and relate pp. 50-1 of
The Art Of The Deal (pb) to his campaign and you'll be a lot more wised-up than most.
