The Daily - Wednesday, Apr. 4, 2018

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

It started with a report on Fox News, and ended with calls for United States troops at the border with Mexico. We look at how President Trump’s approach to immigration transformed over just 72 hours. Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who covers the White House for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, it started with a TV report. It ended with calls for U.S. troops at the Mexican border. The 72 hours that transformed President Trump's approach to immigration. It's Wednesday, April 4th. Julie, how does President Trump start his Easter Sunday? The president's down in Mar-a-Lago and he's with his family. We haven't heard much from him. He wakes up and the first tweet of the day is just all caps, Happy Easter. And it seems like an uncommonly quiet morning.

Julie Davis covers the White House for The Times. And then... President Trump apparently has a lot on his mind, at least according to his Twitter account. About an hour later... President Donald Trump is accusing Mexico of laughing at U.S. immigration policies. The president sends another series of tweets,

and these are much more animated. And he starts out, border patrol agents are not allowed to properly do their job at the border because of ridiculous liberal Democrat laws like catch and release, getting more dangerous, caravans coming. Republicans must go to nuclear options to pass tough laws now. No more DACA deal. And then a short time later, he comes back with.

Mexico is doing very little, if not nothing, at stopping people from flowing into Mexico through their southern border and then into the U.S. They laugh at our dumb immigration laws. They must stop the big drug and people flows or I will stop their cash cow NAFTA. Need wall! Exclamation point. And then finally, these big flows of people, he tweets, are all trying to take advantage of DACA. They want in on the act. When the president tweeted all of this, it seemed to sort of pull together a bunch of

diffuse threads about immigration that don't seem to be obviously related. It sparked a lot of confusion and people were thinking, well, where is he getting this? And after a while, people started to look back at what we've now discovered is the president's favorite viewing habit, which is to turn on Fox News. And lo and behold, this group of migrants, 1,200, marching to America and the BuzzFeed reporter that's going along with them reporting on it. Fox News had just aired a segment talking about what they were calling the caravan. They're marching to the US border because they want in and they want to make a statement with a reporter touting what they're doing. An army of migrants marching to America.

This is what we have coming to our borders and that's why it's more important than ever that we build a wall and we get serious about border security. So you've got these this caravan. Apparently they're going to stop in Mexico City and ask for asylum there. But here's the thing. They're in Mexico. We know they're coming here. So he had seen this report, and seemingly it had gotten him very riled up about immigration once again. So why is Fox News focused on these caravans?

And what are these caravans? So every year for the last several years, there's been a really sharp uptick around this time of year, early spring, of Central American migrants who make their way north through Mexico and toward the United States. It happened in the Obama administration. And this year, as in years past, there is this organization that organized 1,200 people and includes children and old people and people who are facing violence in their countries. And most of them are making their way north because they want to get out of a dangerous situation at home. But some of them are activists who are trying to call attention to the dangerous conditions in their countries and the fact that they don't have a safe place to be. And so Fox has been airing reports about the caravan. It feels like more of

a message, a movement to create a clash than an actual effort to try to seek a better life. I mean, a lot of these people obviously are seeking a better life, but organizers, it seems like there may be an agenda here as well. And on the morning that the president started tweeting about this, had had a former Border Patrol agent, Brandon Judd, on talking about the phenomenon of these migrants coming north. And they're going to create havoc and chaos. I mean, how many times do we have to hear stories of United States citizens being killed by people that are here illegally before we actually do something. And basically arguing, as many of the president's advisors have privately, that the reason that they're coming is because they know that the U.S. has lax border laws and that they'll be able to stay. All they have to do is cross one foot into the border and we have to then take them into custody.

And essentially they're being drawn here because of our weak immigration policies. And what does any of this have to do with NAFTA, the trade deal that the U.S. has with Canada and with Mexico, which the president also mentions in these tweets? Well, again, it's not clear exactly what the president means, but he seems to be suggesting that Mexico is not doing enough to stop these people from getting to the United States. And if they don't step up and do more, he is going to end NAFTA, which is something that he has threatened to do all along. He's threatening to do it even now as ostensibly his administration is renegotiating NAFTA. And so this is one of the points of leverage the president seems to be holding over Mexico in order to get them to do something about this flow of migrants and stop them from coming close to the U.S. border.

So he's bringing in NAFTA here as a threat to Mexico. Is he getting that from Fox? I mean, I think what you're getting from critics of the immigration policy in general on Fox and elsewhere is a sense that Mexico is taking advantage of the United States, a sense that, you know, these migrants are somehow trying to game the system. And it's all about cheating the United States out of security. It's about leaving the border weak and, you know, helping these people who are not Americans at the expense of Americans. The reality is oftentimes illegal immigrants game the system.

Right. So they're here and then they want to go home. Right. So they get deported and they get home and then whether they need to get... It's a free trip. Right. They get to commit a lot of free crimes until they escalate all the way up and graduate to murder and rape.

It's a revolving door. Sexual assault. And then they get paid attention to. Mm-hmm. All right. We need to change that revolving door to a catapult. Finally, how does all of this relate to DACA, as the president suggests in one of these tweets that it does?

So this is the most perplexing thing about the entire series of tweets, because when he talks about people trying to take advantage of DACA, DACA is a policy that was created in 2012 for a specific group of undocumented immigrants who were already in the United States. They were brought here as children by their parents. They grew up in the United States. That was the reason for the creation of the program. You could only benefit from DACA if you were here by 2007. And it essentially allows that group of people to apply for work permits and protection from deportation. So the notion that other people

could be coming into the United States and trying to take advantage of DACA on its face is wrong. I mean, it's erroneous. It's not right. Subsequently, from talking to the president's advisors, what I learned is that what he is talking about, what they argue he's talking about, is that because Congress has been debating what to do about DACA, how to preserve DACA after he ended the program last fall, there is a sense among some of these migrants in Central America that the United States Congress is about to pass a big permissive new immigration policy. And unless you're there, the day they do it, you won't be eligible. Now, that is a stretch on many levels. The negotiations

around DACA have gone nowhere. So the idea that Congress is actually going to do this, it's a pretty long shot. But be that as it may, this all sort of goes back to that argument that the president heard being made on Fox, that because we have weak laws and because we're not talking tough enough on immigration, people somehow think that if they get here, they can stay. So just so I understand, Trump is mischaracterizing these caravans as filled with people eager to make it across the border and capitalize on DACA and mischaracterizing DACA as a program that would allow for that. Essentially, yes. He's muddying the waters about who these people are and what they could possibly get out of existing immigration policies.

But as you said, the president himself ended DACA. So why is he bringing DACA into this debate at this moment? I think there are a lot of reasons. One of the reasons that the president is bringing any of this up at all is because he is still very bitter about having to sign this big spending bill he signed a couple of weeks ago that didn't include funding for the border wall. There's only $1.6 billion for the wall, and that was largely for a fence and replacement of existing wall structures which are falling down.

The president didn't get anything on the immigration side of this deal. The money that was put forward in that spending bill isn't even for a wall. Well, it's like you want to build a house and they give you enough money to put carpeting in your garage. And it really made conservatives mad. It really made immigration hardliners mad that he signed this, you know, trillion-dollar-plus spending bill for the entire year and there was no wall funding in it. I just, I can't see any way to sugarcoat what a disaster this is. You had Ann Coulter go on Fox News, his favorite channel that he watches all the time,

and talk about how disheartened she was. We thought he was perhaps not the world's greatest negotiator, but a negotiator. And we got nothing, nothing, nothing. And that, you know, she just wasn't worth it anymore with him. All of this can be done under his powers as commander-in-chief if he cared and if he wanted to do it. Unfortunately, I think the fact that he signed this omnibus bill is the last straw, and this just says he never wanted to do it.

That echoed a lot of what he was hearing privately from supporters and also, you know, on social media, people saying things like, I'm done. And, you know, we just lost the midterms. Just really dire kind of predictions about this. And, you know, Trump took that really personally. And at the same time, his Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, who had just been in Mexico and talks with her counterparts down there,

came back and briefed him about the migration flows. And his advisor said that was really concerning to him. And then he goes down to Mar-a-Lago for the Easter weekend. And not a lot of aides with him, but one person who does go with him is Steve Miller, who is his senior advisor and the person in the White House who is the hardest liner and the most intense policy mind, essentially, in that orbit on immigration. his administration about this uptick in migration flows, which is a seasonal thing, but it's not appealing to a president who's feeling like he just got walloped

on the issue that he campaigned on, essentially. So it kind of all led to a perfect storm over that weekend. So, Julie, that's the context in which the president turns on the TV on Sunday morning, flips on Fox, and hears about the caravans headed for the U.S. Right. So then how did you interpret those Easter weekend tweets, given everything that you've just explained? What, in your mind, were they intended to do? I think they were really intended to message to his base that he's still with them on this issue, that he still

is a hardliner on immigration policy, that he wants tougher border laws, and to essentially say to them, it's still a priority for me, and I'm willing to stake my reputation on it, essentially. We'll be right back. So what's the result of these tweets that were meant to win back these hardline supporters? Well, it's interesting because when the president started tweeting on Easter Sunday, I'm not sure that there was any real thought in his head of launching a whole new legislative effort on immigration. I think he was venting. I think he was trying to defend himself. But in tweeting those messages and then coming back the following day and tweeting more.

The president started his Monday morning by tweeting about immigration. He bashed Democrats for failing to pass DACA reform and criticized Mexico for not securing the southern border. And confusing people so much about what he actually meant and what he was talking about, what the implications were. It eventually led his advisors to schedule a conference call to essentially talk through some of these issues. And during the conference call, a senior White House official told us that, oh, by the way, the White House and the Department of Homeland Security are working on a whole new legislative effort to get Congress to not do any of the things that we've been talking about for the last several months in terms of DACA and the wall or train migration, but to really make some profound changes to the way that the border enforcement works,

to the way that asylum seekers are treated, to the way that unaccompanied children who arrive at the border are treated. A lot of really fundamental changes that we hadn't heard the president talk about much before, but now seem to be a whole new front in what he's going to try to get Congress to do. Now, none of these things would seem to have much potential to get done on Capitol Hill. But in sort of launching this set of Twitter tirades, the president seems to have either on purpose or inadvertently, launched this whole new legislative effort. Everything you've just described sounds like the kind of measures that a White House would take if it feared that caravans of undocumented immigrants were headed to the United States from, for example, Honduras.

Exactly. Which is complicated, right? Because it sounds like these new immigration policies are a result of the president's tweets sent on Sunday morning, which are a result, theoretically, of a Fox News segment that the president watched on Sunday morning. Yep. So the logical conclusion is that, and bear with me, Fox News, in a sense, got new immigration policies proposed by the president of the United States. I think that's oversimplifying it a little bit. But I do think that there is some strategy here on the part of his advisors who realize that the president is motivated by what his base wants.

The president is very much concerned about the public perception of how his policies are working or not working. And so I think it's more of an interaction of a group of advisors around the president trying to get him to a place where strategically he can be making the case that you would make if you wanted to achieve these policy objectives. It's just unlike another president, rather than sit in a meeting and, you know, make a plan and say, this is how we're going to go at this issue. With this president, Fox News and the tweeting and the reaction from the base are critical parts of the process. So on Tuesday, there are some rumblings about what the next shoot-a-drop might be,

and some talk that the president may be considering even more aggressive action at the border, but it's not really clear what that's going to be. And then at the White House... It's a privilege to host all of you at the White House for this historic summit. Where he was hosting some leaders of some Baltic countries. The president just blurts out. That he wants to deploy the military to the border. And why would he say that?

Well, he's sitting next to Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense. We have very bad laws for our border. And we are going to be doing some things. I've been speaking with General Mattis. We're going to be doing things militarily. And nobody really knows what he's talking about. And Mattis' face is not betraying much of anything in terms of whether he's surprised or not surprised.

But it seemed like for the past 48 hours, the coverage he was getting, the response he was getting from this very tough talk was very appealing to him. He liked the feedback. Our top story, President Trump's standoff with Mexico over its failure to protect borders. President Trump is trying to fix these repeated failures by pushing for a border wall and stricter immigration laws, while liberals are openly defying his administration and the federal government. The president just wants to know who's in the country to keep the criminals out, make sure our country's safe, period. All of a sudden, you know, instead of talking about how he abandoned the base

or he wasn't tough enough, every newspaper, every TV outlet has stories about how he's cracking down and he's starting again on this immigration push. And that's a comfortable place for him. So it felt like he was just pushing it to its next logical conclusion. So the president liked the coverage of his original tweets starting on Sunday so much that he seems to want to push it as far as he possibly can. And pushing it as far as he possibly can seems to include putting U.S. troops on the Mexican border. Right. You know, a lot of this is about creating

a political message about what needs to happen on immigration policy that he and Republicans can carry through to the midterm elections. And so if you want to have a rationale for a very tough approach, you have to set about persuading people that there's a real crisis, there's a real danger, there's a real threat. And one way to do that is to say, you know, this is so bad that we now need to get the military involved. So how is all of this now playing out on Fox? It's playing very well. When he talks about putting the military on the border, we've done that before. So he's not escalating any hate.

He's not escalating any discontent. What he's trying to do is he's trying to secure a sovereign nation from people that are crossing the borders illegally. I do think that the idea of introducing the military into this is going to be complicated and the details are going to matter. If in fact he is planning to propose a large deployment, that's going to cost a lot of money. You're going to have a lot of conservatives saying, well, I'm not really sure that's where we should be going at this point. But I think he feels like this is playing very well with the conservative base. With the larger Republican Party, it's not as clear.

With the base, I think the feedback's been pretty positive. Julie, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, an attorney for a prestigious corporate law firm was sentenced to 30 days in prison for lying to the FBI, becoming the first person to be sentenced in the special counsel's Russia investigation. The attorney, Alex Van Der Zwaan, was charged with lying about his interactions with two associates of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman, who is himself charged with money laundering in the investigation.

who is himself charged with money laundering in the investigation. At one point, Van der Swaan deleted potentially incriminating emails, but he later cooperated with Mueller's investigators, handing over computers and recordings, which may have contributed to his short sentence. In a statement delivered in court on Tuesday, Van der Swaan said, quote, In a statement delivered in court on Tuesday, Van Der Swans said, quote,

what I did was wrong. I apologize to the court for my conduct. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.