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OPINION

TRUMP WANTS TO MAKE DETERRENCE AND (REALLY) LEGAL IMMIGRATION GREAT AGAIN


IN AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW, WE DISCUSSED PROJECT 2025, RESTORING DETERRENCE AND
TRUMP’S OWN IMMIGRANT STORY.

15 min
2278

Donald Trump speaks to journalists about immigration at Montezuma Pass in
Arizona on Aug. 22. (Tom Brenner for The Washington Post)
By Marc A. Thiessen
September 30, 2024 at 6:45 a.m. EDT

PALM BEACH, Fla. — One is struck, upon arriving at Donald Trump’s personal
office on the second floor of his Mar-a-Lago Club, by how modest it is.

Walking past a photo of Trump with Ronald Reagan by the doorway, I stepped into
a small, sunlit room decorated with gifts from supporters, a shelf filled with
the books he has published and “jumbos” — large, framed photos from his
presidency that once lined the walls of the West Wing (and might one day again).



Trump greeted me before taking a seat behind a small oak desk, far less ornate
than the Resolute Desk he once used in the Oval Office. Behind him was a
painting of nine Republican presidents in a bar, modeled on “Dogs Playing
Poker.” To his right, blocking the window, is a large, recently installed panel
of bulletproof glass — a reminder of the two assassination attempts he faced in
nine weeks.

While his office is modest, the man who occupies it has outsize ambitions to do
something no former president has done since Grover Cleveland: take back the
White House after losing it four years earlier.

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I had come to see Trump for an interview, which happened to have been scheduled
for the day after a gunman was discovered lying in wait in the bushes of his
West Palm Beach golf course. But Trump didn’t bring up this new attempt on his
life. (Here’s my column about what he said when I asked him about it.) Rather,
what he wanted to talk about first (well, after the latest polls) was the
Heritage Foundation’s much-pored-over Project 2025, a far-right wish list that
Democrats have been working furiously to tie to Trump.

“The head guy called me up. I said, ‘You have no right to write a thing like
that. You’re not speaking for me,’” Trump told me, referring to the
organization’s president, Kevin Roberts. “I said, ‘You really — what you did is
terrible.’”

“Not only that,” he added. “They were interviewing people for jobs, which isn’t
so good.”

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Project 2025 has unquestionably been a gift to the Harris campaign. A September
New York Times-Siena College survey found that a near-majority of likely voters
say Trump is “not too far” to the left or right on the issues, while a 47
percent plurality find Harris “too liberal or progressive,” and 52 percent say
she is a “risky” choice. So Harris is using Project 2025 to paint Trump as the
risky extremist in the race. “They know it’s been disavowed, but they take ads
and then they [use] … the worst five sentences.”



But, he said, “we’ll live through it. Things like that happen though, and
they’re really bad. They can really ruin a campaign.”

Trump noted that Harris has backed off much of her 2019 agenda. “She changed
everything,” he said. “We were going to send her a MAGA hat.” But she has not
laid out a coherent platform to replace her old one, and as a result has been
unable to answer such basic questions as what she would do on Day 1. So, I asked
Trump: What would you do on Day 1?

“Not one thing, many things,” he said. “First thing: Close the border. People
are going to come into the country, but they’re going to come in legally.” And
he said he would unleash domestic energy production — promising to prod gains at
multiple times the levels achieved during Biden’s term — which he argued would
be a powerful antidote to the high inflation of the Biden-Harris years. “Energy
is going to bring prices way down,” he said. “That’s going to bring interest
rates way down.”

But energy is central to his thinking for another reason: his desire to restore
deterrence, and thus peace, in the world. He argued that Biden’s approach to
energy early in his term helped spark Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “It drove
[the price of oil] up to a hundred dollars a barrel. And Putin said, ‘Man, at a
hundred dollars a barrel, I’m going to be the only one to make money on the
war.’”

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There is an increasingly vocal isolationist faction in the Republican Party that
believes Trump is their ally. And Trump fed that perception by choosing one of
that faction’s most vocal champions, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), as his running mate.

But as I have pointed out, any fair examination of Trump’s first-term record
shows that he is no isolationist. This is a president who destroyed the Islamic
State’s caliphate, bombed Syria (twice) for using chemical weapons on its own
people, killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Qasem Soleimani, launched a
cyberattack on Russia, approved an attack that killed hundreds of Russian Wagner
Group mercenaries, armed Ukraine with Javelin missiles, and warned he would
unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if North Korea continued
to threaten the United States.

I wanted to learn more about his strategy for maintaining peace in a second
term. I pointed out he has said he believes that if he were in office, Russia
would never have invaded Ukraine and Iran would never have attacked Israel.
“Correct,” he said. So, I asked: Will China attack Taiwan while you’re
president?

“Nope, not while I’m president,” Trump said. “But eventually they will.”

“Taiwan’s a tough situation,” Trump continued. “Don’t forget, it’s 9,000 miles
away” from the United States, while Taiwan is just 100 miles from China. He
wants Taiwan’s leaders to use the next four years to dramatically increase their
defense investments. I pointed out that Taiwan is now spending 2.6 percent of
its GDP on defense, which is more than all but a handful of NATO allies. “They
should spend 10,” Trump said.

I also noted that during their debate, Harris said that if Trump were still
president, Vladimir Putin would be in Kyiv. “No, he would’ve never [invaded],”
Trump replied. “Putin would’ve never [have] gone into Ukraine. We would talk
about it, and it was the apple of his eye, but he would never have gone in with
me [in charge].”

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Trump is the only president in the 21st century on whose watch Putin did not
invade his neighbors. He marched on Georgia under George W. Bush, seized Crimea
and started a guerrilla war in Donbas under Barack Obama (fighting continued
there while Trump was in office), and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine
on Biden’s watch. But, Trump pointed out, Putin “didn’t take anything” during
his presidency.

“You have to look at history,” he said. “For four years, he wasn’t lined up at
the border. He only started really thinking about it, to be honest with you,
after Afghanistan” — referencing Biden’s disastrous handling of the U.S.
withdrawal in 2021.

“The problem is, now it’s a much different situation because [Putin has] lost a
lot of men, but he’s made a lot of progress. You know, he has taken over large
portions of that country,” Trump said. “And one of the biggest problems I have
is that Europe — as they did with NATO before I came along — Europe skates.
Europe should be putting the same money as us. Europe is a similar size. The
economy, if you add them all up, it’s a similar size.”

What about NATO allies, such as Poland and Lithuania, that have given more aid
to Ukraine than the United States as a percentage of GDP? “Well, the ones that
are close,” Trump said, “they’re in trouble if something happens. Poland’s in a
different circumstance than some of the others. Some of the others are … much
further away. … They should pay equal to us.”

Many on the anti-Ukraine right believe Trump shares their hostility toward
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. But Trump told me he likes Zelensky. “I
had a good relationship with Zelensky,” Trump said. “I like him. Because during
the impeachment hoax … he could have said he didn’t know the [conversation] was
taped. … But instead of grandstanding and saying, ‘Yes, I felt threatened,’ he
said, ‘He did absolutely nothing wrong.’”



Just over a week ago, Zelensky sparked controversy when he visited a factory in
the battleground state of Pennsylvania that manufactures ammunition for Ukraine
with Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and Sen. Bob Casey (D) present but no Republicans.
This prompted Trump to take a shot at Zelensky during a campaign event. But the
two leaders patched things up at Trump Tower on Friday. At a news conference
before they sat down, Trump heaped praise on Zelensky, calling him “a piece of
steel” during his impeachment and declaring that, thanks to him, “the
impeachment hoax died right there.” After their meeting, Trump said “I learned a
lot” and “we both want to see this [war] end, and we both want to see a fair
deal made, and it’s going to be fair.” He even accepted Zelensky’s invitation to
visit Ukraine, saying: “I will. It’s a beautiful country, beautiful weather,
beautiful, beautiful, everything. But we have to get this over with.”

How will he do that? I asked Trump about an interview with Fox News’s Maria
Bartiromo in July of last year in which he said that, if Putin does not agree to
a peace deal, he’ll give Ukraine more aid than they’ve ever gotten before. Did
he stand by that? “I did say that, so I can say it to you. But I did say that
and nobody picked it up. They don’t because it makes so much sense.”

Listening to Trump discuss how he deterred America’s adversaries, a theme
emerges: Biden emboldens our enemies by signaling that he fears escalation;
Trump makes our enemies fear escalation, which causes them to back down.

This is what the isolationist right does not grasp about Trump: His strategy to
maintain peace is not to retreat from the world, but to make our enemies
retreat. He employs escalation dominance, using both private and public channels
to signal to our adversaries that he is ready to jump high up the escalation
ladder in a single bound — daring them to do that same — while simultaneously
offering them a way down the ladder through negotiation. One of the clearest
examples from his presidency: Trump killed Soleimani and then warned Iran’s
leaders that he had picked out 52 targets inside Iran in honor of the 52
hostages they took in 1979. He added that if Iran retaliated, he would hit them.

Iran stood down. Few presidents in recent memory have flexed America’s military
might more effectively to deter war.

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I’m a supporter of Trump’s policies to crack down on illegal immigration, but
not the language he sometimes employs. The problem at our southern border is not
that so many people want to come here. It’s that so many are coming here
illegally. And Trump’s rhetoric can obscure the fact that he agrees with me
about that. So I asked Trump: Is he a strong supporter of legal immigration? “I
am,” he said. “We need people.”

Indeed, it has been little noticed, but Trump has promised that, if elected, he
will offer permanent residency to every foreign student who graduates from a
U.S. university. I wanted to talk to him about this idea, which I think deserves
more attention than it is getting. The United States hosted more than 1 million
foreign students from virtually every country in the 2022-2023 academic year,
and it gave green cards to just over 1 million people in 2022. Trump’s proposal
would dramatically increase the number of foreigners granted lawful permanent
residence in America.



“If you spend four years in college, I think you should get a green card as part
of your diploma,” he said. “I feel that — and some people in the Republican
[Party] don’t — but … one of the biggest complaints I had from people heading up
companies [is that foreign students] go to the Wharton School of Finance, they
go to Harvard, they go to these different places, and Stanford, and [American
businesses] can’t recruit because … they’re not allowed to stay in the country.
And they want to be able to recruit them and they can’t do it. And I’m going to
have serious discussions with a lot of people about when you go through four
years of college or two years of college, if you’re in a junior college. And
it’ll also be good for colleges, frankly.”

“There are many cases where these young people go back to India, they go back to
wherever they come from, they end up [working for] the same company,” he said.
“They ended up being the biggest people. … We could have had [them]. … These
[students] go up and they relocate into Canada and other places where they do
that. Canada gets a lot of business because we can’t guarantee [permanent
residency].”

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This is an entrepreneurial view of immigration that Trump rarely shows to
Americans, but it is true to his roots. So I pointed to the black-and-white
pictures of his mother and father behind his desk and asked him to tell me his
family’s immigration story. “My father came from Germany — he was 5 years old —
through his parents. His father was in Alaska for the gold rush. And he ended up
doing little tiny little hotels for the guys that went up. He said, ‘I could do
better if I do a hotel than look for the gold.’ But he died at a fairly young
age of pneumonia from Alaska. But very strong guy, very good guy. And [he]
moved. His mother lived in Queens — Richmond Hill, which is sort of [the] German
section of Queens.

“My father was a builder. He graduated from high school and did a great job,” he
continued. “My mother came from Scotland, and she never went back. She came here
to work. … She loved Scotland, had great respect for the queen. Anything with
the queen was good. … And [they were] great parents. … They were married for
many, many decades, and they had a great marriage.”

During our interview, Trump handed me a printout of a Truth Social post he had
put out that day. It read: “OUR BORDERS MUST BE CLOSED, AND THE TERRORISTS,
CRIMINALS, AND MENTALLY INSANE, IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM AMERICAN CITIES AND
TOWNS, DEPORTED BACK TO THEIR COUNTIES OF ORIGIN. WE WANT PEOPLE TO COME INTO
OUR COUNTRY, BUT THEY MUST LOVE OUR NATION, AND COME IN LEGALLY AND THROUGH A
SYSTEM OF MERIT.”



While there is much focus on his typically all-caps calls for deportation, I was
struck by how this one was paired with an all-caps endorsement of legal
immigration. It horrifies many on the left, but the truth is that Trump’s hard
line on illegal immigration reflects the beliefs of a majority of Americans. His
mass deportation pledge has widespread public support. A CBS-YouGov poll in June
found that 62 percent of voters supported “a new national program to deport all
undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. illegally” — including 53
percent of Hispanics. An Economist-YouGov poll in February found that 56 percent
of Americans supported “using military troops to arrest and deport people who
are in the U.S. unlawfully.” Just 31 percent were opposed. And an Axios poll
from April found that 42 percent of Democrats supported “mass deportations of
undocumented immigrants.”

One of the tragedies of the Biden-Harris border disaster is that the
record-breaking flood of unlawful migrants they have let in has depressed
support for legal immigration. While a June Gallup poll found 64 percent still
say immigration is a good thing, a 55 percent majority now say they want
immigration levels reduced — the first time in nearly two decades that a
majority have said they want less legal immigration.

That’s clearly a reason Trump rarely talks about legal immigration on the stump.
He knows it isn’t popular with his base, and that many Americans are not open to
expanding legal immigration. They won’t be as long as the country is in the
midst of the worst border crisis since the Mexican-American War.

But just as with the isolationists’ misjudgment of Trump, I’m firmly convinced
it’s wrong to label him a nativist. “Your parents obviously made America a
better place,” I said to him. “Do you think immigrants make America a better
place?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he said.

I wish he would say so on the campaign trail.

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