Donald Trump and his allies have turned the full force of the right-wing propaganda machine to protecting the president from the Mueller report’s documentation of obstruction of justice and complicity with Russia’s attack on the 2016 election. In the face of this, with Democrats already hamstrung by their own too-slow grappling with the unprecedented treachery and lawlessness of this White House, it can sometimes seem like Trump’s future hinges on this single, albeit deeply important, issue.
But as Tuesday’s reporting from The Washington Post reminds us, taking down this president won’t just be about Trump’s willingness to accept help from a dangerous foreign adversary, but also about attacking the president on multiple fronts: in this case, undermining the president’s war on undocumented immigrants. As yet another story about the president’s use of undocumented labor, including alleged wage theft and lack of overtime pay, at yet another of his golf clubs makes clear, Donald Trump loved undocumented workers until he started running for president.
What makes this a vulnerability for Trump, and not just another part of his past he can just shuck off, is that it’s contiguous with a broader vulnerability for the GOP at large. Trump has brought the Republican Party’s strategy to new heights of bullshit: convince the rank and file that undocumented immigrants are the cause of all bad things in their lives, from losing a job to being threatened by violence, while actually doing nothing that would either substantially slow immigration northward (such as greatly increased economic aid to countries like El Salvador and Guatemala) or punish U.S. employers who hire such workers. Yet too many businesses continue to rely on the cheap labor of undocumented immigrants for expelling existing immigrants or truly barring further immigration to ever be acceptable to major business sectors/Republican supporters. Meanwhile, businesses like Trump’s simply continue to hire undocumented workers, who bear the lion’s share of the legal risk of such employment. A grotesque, quasi-mathematical truth emerges: undocumented immigrants are increasingly desirable as the compensation a businessman like Trump needs to pay them approaches zero.
I don’t doubt that most Trump supporters will dismiss stories like those reported by the Post as fake news, or simply as evidence that Trump changed his priorities once he became president. But as with many of the obvious faults and failures of Trump’s personality and policies, talking about such issues can peel away at least some voters from his coalition; can help sow doubts that the man really is on their side. And immigration is Trump’s defining issue, the way that he’s made himself appear strong and managed to inject white supremacist thinking into the political mainstream in the name of defending national sovereignty. Anything that can be done to mess with perceptions of his authenticity on this front is well worth exploring and exploiting.