A negotiation ploy?

Kurt Schlichter writes at Town Hall about Trump's meeting with Congresscritters on illegal immigration,

...Maybe the Nice Trump at the meeting was a negotiation ploy. There’s a technique in negotiations where you wave the other side’s objective right in front of them, let them smell it, feel it just within their grasp, and when you get them so invested in the idea that it is about to be theirs, you snatch it back and lay your demands on them in the hopes they’ll feel they’re so close to success that they have to give in.

...Or maybe Dreamer-hugger Trump was playing the good cop while Stephen Miller, who is infuriating the surrender caucus by being the proverbial monkey in the wrench, was being the bad cop. It could be a giant mind game with the mindless drones of the legislature.

Maybe. But it’s a dangerous game.

Outsourcing so much of the negotiations and details to the simpering wusses of the GOP House and Senate, who are yearning for some way to do exactly the opposite of what their voters elected them to do, was always risky. Sailor Suit Lindsey Graham and his pals came up with a plan that Trump rejected with the dung-depths comments. If they want a deal, they better come up with a solid bill where Trump gets some trophies. But at the end of the day, Trump gets to either sign on the line that is dotted, or not. And if a bunch of people who shouldn’t be here anyway don’t get to stay here, oh well.

Read more here.

A mushy catchphrase

Victor Davis Hanson writes:

Everyone finds a lesson in the Republican midterm tsunami.

One message was that so-called comprehensive immigration reform and broad amnesty have little national public support. Polls have long shown that, but so do last week’s election results.

In reaction, President Obama sulked, threatening to quickly push through an unpopular amnesty by executive order. Obama apparently knows that he enjoys neither public nor congressional support for his planned executive fiat.

Voters assume that liberal-elite advocates of open borders who mock finishing the border fence still count on the fences around their own estates — whether Hollywood grandees, the former mayor of Los Angeles, or the president of the United States.

But will reform advocates say whether they would favor deporting those who just arrived in the cynical expectation of amnesty? Will they deport to their countries of origin those who sought public assistance instead of work in the U.S., or those who abused their guest status by committing crimes in their host country? So far, advocates of reform stay mostly mum on those topics. The result is that “comprehensive immigration reform” remains a mushy catchphrase that can mean anything and therefore means nothing.

Read more here.