Trump created an opening this week with his effort to scuttle a congressional deal that would provide enhanced border enforcement.
It is Nikki Haley’s unhappy lot to have to navigate a news cycle dominated by immigration just as she is embarking on the scorched-earth phase of her uphill bid to prevent Donald Trump’s third presidential nomination. Immigration is Trump’s strong suit, after all — at least, it is among Republicans. If he has a signature issue, it’s border security. GOP voters generally regard the record he established in office as unassailable. Trump cannot be attacked from his right on immigration issues, and it’s foolish to even try . . . right?
That seems to be the assumption inside the Haley camp. Since Tuesday, Haley has savaged Trump over his abysmal electoral record and that of his hand-picked acolytes, the former president’s increasingly frequent senior moments, his propensity for deficit spending, his desire to “ban” Haley supporters from the MAGA movement, and his conspicuous refusal to stand beside her on a debate stage. On immigration, Haley hasn’t shied away from the subject, but her criticisms of Trump have been tepid.
“He’s said nothing about how he’s going to secure the border and what he’s going to do different that he didn’t do when he was president before,” Haley said in a Fox News Channel interview on Friday. That is likely because most Republican primary voters don’t need to hear the specifics. They fill in Trump’s blanks with his accomplishments, and they excuse his failures as the work of Republican wreckers and obdurate Democrats.
So, Trump is entirely unassailable on the issue then, right? Maybe. But the former president created an opening this week with his effort to scuttle a congressional deal that would provide enhanced border enforcement. According to reports, the former president is lobbying congressional Republicans to capsize a negotiated agreement (the details of which are not fully known), asking them to endure the acute migrant crisis for the remainder of the year, after which he will bestow upon them “the perfect deal.”
Trump all but confirmed those reports Thursday night. Amid a series of gratuitous attacks on Senator Mitt Romney for having the temerity to criticize Trump’s willingness to preserve Joe Biden’s border crisis just long enough to capitalize on it, the former president asserted that “we need a Strong, Powerful, and essentially ‘PERFECT’ Border.” He added, “Unless we get that, we are better off not making a Deal, even if that pushes our Country to temporarily ‘close up’ for a while…” What any of that means is subject to the exegesis of his willing interpreters, but one thing is certain: Trump doesn’t want the deal.
Again, the precise terms of what congressional Republicans negotiated with their Democratic counterpart are not known. What is known is that the border crisis has put Democrats on the back foot, and they’ve offered up a variety of concessions on enforcement in an effort to cauterize that political wound. We know they are concessions because immigration doves are fit to be tied over them.
The emerging Senate plan seeks to reduce the number of border-crossers granted parole — migrants subject to what Republicans deride as a program of “catch and release” — by tightening enforcement and speeding up deportation processing. That, the New York Times noted, offends Democrats for whom parole is a “crucial tool” to prevent “vulnerable populations fleeing failing states and war” from being returned to their countries of origin. Democrats rallied on the steps of the Capitol last week bearing signs that read “#SaveAsylum” following word that the deal would make it harder to grant asylum status — provisions like, for example, strengthening the “credible fear” standard. One rumored proposal, the expansion of the Family Expedited Removal Management (FERM) program, has the American Civil Liberties Union up in arms. Migrants subject to it are electronically monitored and subject to curfews, which measures are “are particularly demeaning and frightening” for “people who have recently endured trauma on their harrowing journey to safety.”
Some Republicans have assailed the terms of the not-yet-public plan as a fig leaf. It is not expected to include funding for additional miles of border wall, the rollback of Flores settlement protections for migrant children, and other provisions in the GOP’s border protection bill H.R. 2 — a bill that could reasonably constitute the “perfect deal” from a Republican perspective. But nor do Democrats get all — or much of anything — that they want. The deal doesn’t grant amnesty to migrants or provide a pathway to citizenship. And if the complaint is that the legislation just gives lawmakers cover to claim they did something on immigration, that is an indictment of all compromise legislation.
If surveys are to be believed, Americans aren’t playing games with pollsters when they say they really do want to see something done about the border. Today, immigration as an issue cuts against Joe Biden because his lethargic indifference to the crisis has not gone unnoticed. But Donald Trump does the GOP no favors by signaling his willingness to forgo additional enforcement provisions designed to chip away at the problem incrementally. Can Nikki Haley make an issue of that? Of course she can.
National Review contributor Christian Schneider posited one rhetorical option available to Haley if she wanted to test the waters:
To the extent that any issue matters in the GOP primary, immigration stands at the top of the list. So it’s political malpractice if Haley doesn’t hammer Trump on the border issue. “He wants to keep it open to help himself – I will close it.”
— Christian Schneider (@Schneider_CM) January 26, 2024
In her Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan offered another. She can and should concede that Trump is “entertaining” and “exciting” to Republican voters, but she isn’t and shouldn’t be. “I am here to capably close the border,” Noonan and her GOP strategist confidantes imagine Haley saying. “Wouldn’t that be the real excitement?”
A cynical reading of the GOP tars Republicans as “a post-policy party.” Of course, policy does matter to Republican voters. Most of them who support Trump do so on the grounds that the policies he executed as president were vastly preferable to Biden’s. But they might take stock of the fact that the architects and executors of those policies who served in Trump’s first term are now the objects of Trump’s undying hatred, and the feeling is mutual. Haley was one of those figures.
The southern border is a foreign policy issue, and for the first two years of Trump’s presidency, foreign policy was Haley’s portfolio. She can make a play to insert herself into a news cycle dominated by the immigration issue by supporting rather than undermining congressional Republican efforts to secure the best possible deal today so as to start addressing this urgent problem tomorrow.
After all, Haley’s whole argument for her candidacy is that Trump cannot win the White House. Trump’s claim is that the GOP can endure this crisis until he takes office on January 20, 2025. Haley is obliged to warn Republicans that they won’t get any border deal if Biden is reinstalled in the White House. She has nothing to lose by arguing that the GOP is staking everything on a risky bet. And it will be a disaster if the party pushes all its chips in on a busted hand.