Perhaps the kindest thing a thinking person can say now about Donald Trump is that he is a gambler.
A cowardly gambler.
He listened to his closest allies who, worried about his poll numbers, pressed him to go to Mexico to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto. The hope – after a week of Trump’s mixed signals on immigration when the candidate described his views first as “softening” and then as “hardening” – was that he might present himself to American voters and to the world as a statesman.
But like everything else Trumpian, the trip was all show.
After all, what else could it be? His mouth hath runneth over, and now he needed to avoid his former pledges to build a border wall that Mexico will pay for and to deport 11 million Latinos, all without renouncing those pledges. Meanwhile, he needed to try making nice with Hispanic voters, and he especially needed to untangle the recoils of moderate Republicans who find his savage denigration of all who are not white men to be singularly unpresidential.