Trump vs. Ramos: A Clash of Icons
Donald Trump, who famously scoffs at "political correctness," can climb as far up on his high horse as anybody else when someone is impolite to him.
Someone like, for example, Jorge Ramos, main news anchor at Univision and Fusion, who tried to ask Trump a question at a Dubuque news conference on Wednesday without being called on.
Yes, I would agree with Ramos' critics that he violated Trump's ground rules. But both men got something out of this face-off. Each looked tough and uncompromising to his fan base.
Ramos, famous for his confrontational interview style after weeks of trying, finally forced Trump to face an important question: How was he going to deport, as he has promised, all of the nation's estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.
That's a good question. Immigration reform is Trump's signature issue. Yet he produces no clue in his interviews, his news conferences or his brief immigration position paper as to how much his mass deportation scheme would cost.
No wonder Trump is popular among disgruntled folks who long for simple answers in our complicated world. When he finally got around to addressing Ramos' question, he made mass deportation sound easy.
"I have a bigger heart than you do," he Trump-splained. "We're going to do it in a very humane fashion. ... The one thing we're going to start with immediately are the gangs, and the real bad ones, and you do agree there are some bad ones? Do you agree with that or do you think everyone is just perfect? ... We have tremendous crime, we have tremendous problems."
That's The Donald for you. He makes a grand statement, then implies that you, the questioner, must be a coddler of criminals to challenge his wisdom.
In fact, we should have no delusion that mass deportation would be cheap or easy. The conservative American Action Forum, for example, estimates that mass deportation would take about 20 years and the federal government would have to spend $400 billion to $600 billion to catch, detain, process and transport the immigrants to their home countries.
The Bipartisan Policy Center found that removing all undocumented immigrants from the United States would reduce the U.S. labor force by 6.4 percent, shrink the nation's gross domestic product (GDP), grow the deficit and damage the housing market, among other areas of the economy.
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(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
