All the way back on July 13, 2015, when Donald Trump’s initial rise in the polls caused early onset apoplexia among Republicans, I wrote a column at National Review, Trump’s Lesson: Voters Are Furious about Illegal Immigration:
One section in Trump’s Phoenix speech jumped out at me as capturing especially well what is happening on the ground:
When I started . . . I didn’t think the immigration thing would take on a life like it has. I made some very tough statements about people flowing through, because that’s one of the things, to make our country great again, we have to create borders, otherwise we don’t have a country [italics added].
Any Republican who doesn’t understand what Trump was getting at is hopelessly out of touch with the most motivated portion of the electorate, Republican and otherwise…. The sense that we are losing control of our own country, by the design of politicians, is creating a fury — and an opening for a politician willing to recognize that the problem poses an existential threat to our own freedoms….
That’s it. It’s the sovereignty. Out of the general illegal immigration theme, Trump is focusing increasingly on the sub-theme of sovereignty:
“We Don’t Have A Country Without A Border” is how he frequently phrases it in his current speeches.
That is dismissed as “nativist” or so on, but it’s not. It’s about the sovereignty of the United States as a nation.
Ron Coleman (Legal Insurrection’s lawyer) lays out the argument on Twitter tonight:
And then he delivered the coup de grâce:
Indeed.
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