During an interview last June, then-candidate Donald Trump was asked what he thought about foreign students attending American universities.
“What I want to do and what I will do is you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country,” he said.
It was an idea he’d borrowed from Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, saying foreign students who want to stay after graduation “should not be thrown out of our country.”
As you might have guessed by now, Trump didn’t follow through on that pledge. But he didn’t just renege on his promise; he’s doing its exact opposite. The Trump administration is moving quickly to try to deport foreign students studying here and halting the interviews necessary for foreign students who want to study here in the future.
Setting aside the broken promise for a moment, this episode includes a valuable lesson for Democrats trying to figure out how to make a comeback.
Though he has governed as the most extreme conservative president in the modern era, Trump regularly took more centrist positions as a candidate, especially on moderate and progressive ideas that polled well.
He also threw out so many positions — often on the same issue — that only the most obsessed voters could keep straight what he really thought. His fans often picked and chose the ones they most agreed with, while other voters started to think that he was something of a moderate.
This sounds hard to believe, but polls in 2024 regularly showed that a large number of voters considered Trump something of a centrist. A New York Times/Siena College poll in September found that 10% thought he wasn’t conservative enough, 32% too conservative and 49% “not too far either way.” (A similar plurality, meantime, thought Kamala Harris was “too liberal or progressive.”)
Of course, Trump also made a number of harshly conservative campaign proposals.
In fact, many of Trump’s most controversial actions were previewed quite clearly during the 2024 campaign. He promised to enact the largest mass deportation in U.S. history, impose large tariffs on foreign goods (especially those from China), shut down the Department of Education, pardon all the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, kick transgender service members out of the military and stop government efforts to address climate change. Unlike the moderate pledge he has broken, he’s working in earnest to accomplish these goals.
That’s the right-wing version of Trump, and beneath those broad promises are a thousand less visible policy moves being carried out to undermine the government’s ability to function. But there is also a moderate version of Trump that emerges when he speaks off the cuff and says whatever he thinks people want to hear, including some progressive ideas.
That version of Trump is the one who said the government would pay for in vitro fertilization treatments or that he’ll always protect Medicaid or that raising taxes on the rich might be a good idea or that he wants to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.
As a candidate he also made spectacular promises about achievements to come: He’d end Russia’s war on Ukraine within 24 hours after taking office, cut energy costs in half and lower your car insurance rates. And Trump paid tribute to liberal goals — “I want absolutely immaculate, clean water. I want absolutely clean air. And we had it. We had H₂0,” he said during his debate with Joe Biden — even though his actual policies undermine those goals.
That rhetoric made Trump seem more liberal and benevolent than he actually is — especially if you didn’t think through the implications of his promises.
The New York Times recently told the story of a small Missouri town rising up in outrage over the arrest and pending deportation of a beloved resident who has been living there for 20 years since arriving from Hong Kong. “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said one friend of hers from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs.”
So did they vote for this? The answer is yes and no. Almost no one went to the polls saying, “I’m voting for Trump because I wish we didn’t have food inspections, help for people with addiction or cancer research.” But if you voted for Trump, you should at least have known that he and his party were preparing an all-out assault on the federal government, and that meant cutting the things you like. And if he fooled you into thinking all immigrants are murderous gang members, that’s partly on you.
It may be hard to imagine that even at this late date, some people don’t realize just how malevolent Trump’s intentions are. But there are those who don’t — millions of them. As tempting as it is to mock them for their naivete, those people may change their minds when they realize what he’s really doing. And Democrats might just be able to win them over by looking to some of the moderate promises that Trump made for inspiration.
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