my boy. it was boring dialogue. you re a speech writer, chris. you know this is just dull speech writing. i ve never seen a speech like this where the first half of the speech is sugar coated, all the nice stuff about the flag. of course we love the flag and of course people like bonuses at work. of course all of that stuff. we worry about prescription drugs and things like that and then this ugly turn saying all immigrants are criminals, we have to keep them out of the country so let s talk about immigrants. he started with ms-13. he admitted there s 1.8 billion people in the country whose parents brought them here and they want to be americans and they feel like americans and yet he starts with ms-13. and he goes on to chain migration. this is about family unification. this is not about, you know, distant relatives coming in. and he knows that and we all know that. he s just lying right down the
nation that we re part of. this is woven into the fabric of our nation. president trump wants to wipe it out which is not, not something consistent with who obviously and what we are as a nation primarily of immigrants. and what he also got wrong is when he said that this is an offer he s making that cuts it down the middle. and i think you heard a lot of reaction to that because it s just such an absurd statement to make. not only he did not acknowledge the dreamers who obviously were there and the important contributions they re making to their community and the fact he s the one threatening to make their status illegal. they re legal now abhe s taking that away. he s saying i ll restore it if you do all these other things that my right wring base really wants to happen like wipe out family unification. and so i think it was just not a serious proposal and everyone knew it in the room.
great point. there were a lot of people looking at that asking what gene asked and i certainly understand that it made democrats defensive, but that s your opening round salvo to tell your base i haven t gone soft. look at all these horrible things that immigrants have done and then he follows up by saying, i m going to give almost 2 million dreamers amnesty. a path to citizenship. and citizenship. which i must say is even beyond what many conservatives want, so there was something for both sides to hate and both sides did hate what he said last night. i m talking about the extremes on both sides. exactly. interestingly enough, he didn t completely rule out family unification. he wanted a more narrow version of it, which again is of some substance. he talked about skills based immigration. he teed it up in a way to only talk to one side of the debate but i thought in a week or month
families, if they re going to be able to keep moving forward. so i hope that a solution is reached and i think you know that solution for us has been very clear for a long time and that has been the d.r.e.a.m. act. senator merkley, let me ask you what you made of this. because the president, obviously it s open to interpretation here. but one interpretation of what the president did tonight was try to prime his base that conservative base that he rode to the republican nomination with a hard line immigration view that he was trying to prime them for something they may view as betrayal. that is ultimately the legalization of folks like the man next to you, leonardo. you heard a strong reaction from democrats tonight because there s a number of things that president trump just got wrong. when he was talking about family unification, this has been a very important thing to all of us in america who obviously are citizens if we have sisters or brothers abroad, we want to be able to brin
there and the important contributions they re making to their community and the fact he s the one threatening to make their status illegal. they re legal now and he s taking that away. he s saying i ll restore it if you do all these other things that my right wing base really wants to happen like wipe out family unification. and so i think it was just not a serious proposal and everyone knew it in the room. that was why you got the reaction you did. bigger picture though for a guy who obviously campaigned for the presidency the first press conference or the first speech he gave as a candidate for president he talked about mexicans as rapists coming across the boarder, throwing out more than 10 million folks here right now. when you consider that candidate and as president tonight he did say among other things he did say he favors legalization for 1.8 million, do you think that s significant at all?