NYT writer and avid Trump critic Andrew Sullivan in an Op-Ed piece tells the Democrats to give Trump his wall or else they may never win another election. Sullivan says that Trump won and Hillary lost for a reason.
The Democrats attacked Donald Trump on immigration, labeling him a bigot, a racist and a xenophobe. But that sealed their doom because the majority of Americans also wanted illegal aliens deported. So, in essence, Democrats were calling all o0f them the same thing and they didn’t like it. And Sullivan can see that once again Democrats are trying to make the election about immigration. This time with open borders and the elimination of ICE.
Sullivan said:
“If you do not want to jail kids with their parents indefinitely, or to maintain the incentive for illegal migrants to bring kids along for the harrowing ride, you need some sort of congressional action and soon. There’s something deeply wrong, it seems to me, with expressing the view that what the government is doing is barbaric and yet allowing the underlying cause of it to continue for political reasons. If that’s the case, then Trump is not the only one using kids as pawns. Chuck Schumer is too.”
“The Democrats need to accept that they lost the last presidential election for a reason, and that their opponent’s main campaign pledge was to tackle illegal immigration, with a wall at the southern border as the centerpiece Completely resisting a legitimate agenda based on a clear campaign promise — well, it reminds me of the Republicans with Obamacare.
“And there is clearly an adamant, persistent segment of the public that sees the crisis of illegal immigration as a vital one. They’re not alone. Cast an eye at Brexit Britain, newly populist Italy, Macron’s France, and even Merkel’s Germany as it heaves in response to mass immigration from the developing world. This is a huge force in Western politics in every country. It may be the primary one.”
This is where Sullivan loses all reason. In exchange for the wall, he says the Democrats should insist on a full path to citizenship for all DACA immigrants, a legislative fix for Flores; massive new funding for detention facilities, humane family-friendly housing, and, above all, much more money for the immigration legal system, now completely overwhelmed by asylum cases.
The bottom line is that Sullivan thinks the Democrats need to show they are willing to deal and not just oppose. He is speaking to the deaf.