President Trump gave a speech to his Republican congressional crew on Thursday at their West Virginia planning meeting. GOP members of the House and Senate were strategizing at their three-day conference to map out their legislative agenda [1] to match up with the president’s State of the Union address earlier in the week.
At one point, the president became ebullient about how many promises he had kept (White House transcript [2]):
For the last 12 months, I have kept one promise after another, and we’re just getting started. So often I’ll see — and I must say, six, seven months ago, they were saying, he didn’t fulfill his promise on this or that. I said, I’ve only been here for four months. You know, other people were there for eight years and they would finally get something passed. I was there four months — you know this, Paul — and they were saying, “He didn’t fulfill a promise.”
But now we’ve fulfilled far more promises than we promised. (Laughter.) And they’re having a hard time with that. We have seriously fulfilled promises. I call it “promises plus.” (Laughter.)
Really? How about the major promise that arguably got him elected? The one where Trump pledged “No Amnesty” — most memorably in the Phoenix immigration speech during his campaign on August 31, 2016 (Full transcript here [3]):
Spare audio:
http://www.limitstogrowth.org/ltg-uploads/2018/02/Trump-on-Immigration-There-Will-Be-No-Amnesty.mp3 [4]PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will end catch-and-release.
Under my administration, anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country and back to the country from which they came. Zero tolerance for criminal aliens — zero, zero!
I am going to create a new special deportation task force focused on identifying and quickly removing the most dangerous criminal illegal immigrants in America who have evaded justice. . .
We will break the cycle of amnesty and illegal immigration, we will break the cycle.
There will be no amnesty.
People will know that you can’t just smuggle in, hunker down and wait to be legalized, not gonna work that way. Those days are over.
Welcome to the swamp! Americans understand that when the government rewards a behavior, we all get more of it. Unfortunately in Washington today, law and order are sliced off bit by bit to achieve immigration legislation that likely won’t do the job [5].
Below, sovereignty supporters march against amnesty in 2013.
Furthermore, every time Trump raves about how DACA pests work hard at their American jobs, remember those are jobs that by law belong to US citizens, not illegal aliens.