By DEXTER DUGGAN
PHOENIX — The days of open-borders John McCain are over, if Donald Trump has anything to say about that.
The Arizonan had Trump’s endorsement to win successful renomination as the Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in the Grand Canyon State’s August 30 primary election.
However, when Trump delivered his carefully awaited immigration policy speech here the very next day, it was plain that the prospect of cozy “amnesty” deals, such as dreamed of by McCain and former GOP President George W. Bush, should be dead on arrival at a Trump White House.
It’s as if Trump was telling McCain: OK, John, I endorsed you for the Senate after you endorsed me for the White House, but make no mistake about who’s going to be in control from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
It would be hard to imagine the weaseling McCain speaking Trump’s firm comments that began exactly at 6:30 p.m. and lasted more than an hour.
During introductory remarks by various speakers that lasted about an hour and a half before Trump took the lectern, the very mention of McCain’s name was booed twice by the impressive crowd in a cavernous lower level at the Phoenix Convention Center.
And although national Republican political figures such as former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions were on hand to help introduce Trump, local resident McCain was nowhere to be seen.
Moreover, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the antithesis of McCain on border enforcement, was cheered to the lectern here to recall his early support for Trump’s presidential candidacy last year in this very convention center.
Arpaio had just crushed three GOP opponents in the previous day’s primary election for county sheriff.
The sheriff said he was “very proud of Donald Trump and what happened today” with Trump’s trip to talk things over with the president of Mexico. “He’s not going to give away the United States of America. He’s going to stick to his guns. . . . This guy’s different.”
Foreshadowing one of Trump’s themes of the evening, against turning alien criminals loose in the U.S., Arpaio said he has a big jail system, with 8,000 prisoners, but 39 percent of the aliens he has released to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for processing end up back in his jails.
Arpaio was preceded by another Arizona Republican sheriff, Paul Babeu of Pinal County, also known for fighting against massive illegal immigration.
Exclaiming, “This border is not secure!” Babeu said that Pinal County even has scouts for the drug cartels lurking on its mountaintops.
If those who simply want a better life find it easy to get into the U.S., Babeu said, how about the drug cartels and ISIS terrorists?
Members of the Remembrance Project spoke twice during the program, once before Trump appeared then when he invited them onto the stage. The Remembrance Project has family members who frankly tell of their relatives being harmed or murdered by illegal aliens.
This is a proven strategy by Trump that most candidates had feared to use — demonstrating that it’s not “racism” motivating Americans’ opposition to massive illegal immigration but realistic fear of criminal chaos.
The Manhattan billionaire’s unmistakable reply is: Let’s fix the chaos so there’s no need for fear.
He likely had just dazzled a lot of voters by his in-command day on August 31, jetting from a speech in Washington state to Mexico City to meet with President Enrique Pena Nieto, then back to the United States for his early evening detailed policy statement here.
Trump showed the executive decisiveness to accept Pena Nieto’s invitation for a visit on the contentious immigration issue, as if Trump already were a head of state, then he laid out a firm immigration policy before cheering Arizonans who heard him flatly rule out “amnesty.”
Dominant liberal media seemed primed to gloat that Trump would be backing down on enforcing immigration laws, then didn’t like it a bit when he didn’t. Nor could they have liked his agility at jetting off to confer respectfully with the Mexican president who had attacked him in sharp words earlier this year.
In Phoenix, five rows of desks in the media enclosure, and a forest of cameras on the platform, beheld a 70-year-old presidential candidate with more energy and strategy in a day than his Democratic Party Alinskyite foe, 68-year-old Hillary Clinton, seems capable of in a week.
An opening speaker said Trump’s talk “is probably the most anticipated presidential campaign speech in Arizona history.” Later in the evening, Trump praised Arizona as having “a special place in my heart” for influencing him to decide last year to make a serious run for the presidency.
“This is where it all began for me,” he said. “. . . I said, Let’s go have some fun tonight, we’re going to Arizona.”
Former Mayor Giuliani ridiculed Hillary Clinton, saying, “Based on her experience as secretary of state, I wouldn’t hire her as dogcatcher of New York City.” When the crowd briefly chanted “Lock her up” for her lawbreaking, Giuliani pointed out that the former First Lady gets privileged treatment that would be denied to ordinary citizens.
“Don’t you know that you would have been indicted and arrested by now” if someone in the crowd had dared to delete tens of thousands of government emails, Giuliani said, describing these as “federal crimes.”
Trump said Pena Nieto is “a man I like and respect very much” who “truly loves his country.” The two of them agree, Trump said, on the importance of ending the illegal flows of money, drugs, and people across the border, and putting the cartels out of business.
He said the day’s meeting in Mexico City had “a thoughtful and substantive conversation…and in the end we’re gonna win, both countries.”
The fundamental problem with immigration, Trump said, is that it serves the needs of wealthy donors, activists, and powerful politicians. “But it does not serve you, the American people.”
One must be honest, Trump said, that “not everyone who seeks to join our nation” will be able to assimilate. Americans get to choose, he said, who will be able “to thrive and flourish and love us.”
Recalling Americans killed by illegal entrants, Trump said illegal immigration costs the U.S. more than $110 billion a year, but “this is what we get.”
The government has no idea how many illegal immigrants are in the U.S. but always uses the figure of 11 million, Trump said, although it might be three million or 30 million.
The only issue in the immigration debate “is the well-being of the American people,” Trump declared to cheers.
Hillary Clinton would break the federal budget by providing welfare to illegal aliens and hurting the U.S.’s own blacks and Hispanics, Trump said. “I always say Trojan Horse, folks, not gonna be pretty” about Clinton’s plans, he said.
Trump laid out a 10-point plan beginning with a technologically advanced, “impenetrable” protective wall along the southern border, winning cheers and whoops from the audience.
He said “catch and release” programs will end, to be replaced by sending the detainees “great distances” from the U.S., not simply beyond the U.S. border.
At least two million criminal aliens inside the U.S. will start to be moved out as soon as he takes office as president, Trump said, adding that by his first hour in office, “those people are gone, and you call it ‘deport’ if you want. . . . You can call it whatever the hell you want. . . . The crime will stop. It will be over.”
Vowing to triple the number of ICE deportation officers, Trump jokingly added that Hillary Clinton “has evaded justice. Maybe they’ll be able to deport her.”
Trump also wants to block funding for sanctuary cities and cancel Obama’s “unconstitutional executive orders” on illegal immigration.
“Anyone who has entered the United States illegally is subject to deportation,” Trump said, adding later that anyone seeking legal status here will have only one route: return to their home country and apply from there.
Although the U.S. welcomes legal immigration, he said, the message will be clear to the world that citizenship won’t be obtained through illegal entry. “Those days are over.”
After Trump’s talk, The Wanderer asked Rachel Alexander, senior editor of The Stream blog (stream.org), who was in the media enclosure, if she thought Trump sounded like a new Ronald Reagan.
“A different type of Reagan,” she replied. “. . . People thought he was going to back down on illegal immigration. But after tonight, more hard-core than ever.”
Alexander pointed out that McCain wasn’t a speaker here.
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