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Trump Backs Down on Criticizing Judge
After days of attacks on the judge presiding over the Trump University lawsuit, the presumptive GOP nominee has announced that he is done making comments on the case. Donald Trump’s recent criticism of U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel created a significant backlash from conservative pundits, legal commentators, and elected GOP officeholders.
On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Kirk (R–IL) retracted his endorsement of Trump, while Sen. Jeff Flake (R–AZ) stated that the attacks on Curiel could spur a challenge to his nomination at the GOP Convention. RNC chairman Reince Preibus privately told Trump to back off his attacks on the judge. In response to the controversy, Trump released a statement Tuesday afternoon:
It is unfortunate that my comments have been misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage. I am friends with and employ thousands of people of Mexican and Hispanic descent. The American justice system relies on fair and impartial judges. All judges should be held to that standard. I do not feel that one’s heritage makes them incapable of being impartial, but, based on the rulings that I have received in the Trump University civil case, I feel justified in questioning whether I am receiving a fair trial.
Claiming that some of his best friends are Mexicans seems as tone deaf as praising “my African American,” but it is interesting to see Trump make a rare attempt to back down from controversy. He spends the rest of his statement insisting that his real estate training program was above board and that he is innocent of any wrongdoing in the pending lawsuit. He also attempts to recast his previous complaints in less racial terms:
Normally, legal issues in a civil case would be heard in a neutral environment. However, given my unique circumstances as nominee of the Republican Party and the core issues of my campaign that focus on illegal immigration, jobs and unfair trade, I have concerns as to my ability to receive a fair trial.
I am fighting hard to bring jobs back to the United States. Many companies – like Ford, Nabisco, Carrier – are moving production to Mexico. Drugs and illegal immigrants are also pouring across our border. This is bad for all Americans, regardless of their heritage.
Due to what I believe are unfair and mistaken rulings in this case and the Judge’s reported associations with certain professional organizations, questions were raised regarding the Obama appointed Judge’s impartiality. It is a fair question. I hope it is not the case.
While this lawsuit should have been dismissed, it is now scheduled for trial in November. I do not intend to comment on this matter any further. With all of the thousands of people who have given the courses such high marks and accolades, we will win this case!
We’ll see over the next few days if Trump honors his commitment to keep quiet about Judge Curiel and the Trump University lawsuit.
Update: Oh well, that commitment lasted six hours.
Published in Law
You’re just too harsh.
Let’s say the pro-amnesty Republicans most optimistic estimates regarding the Hispanic vote were true and after adopting open borders policies we managed to get a whopping 45% of the Hispanic vote (4.5 times better than we do with blacks!).
Don’t they see that importing millions of Hispanics would still means losing (albeit at a slower rate)? It’s still more new voters for Democrats than Republicans, which means even more lost elections.
And if you think the GOP mucky-mucks are bending over backwards for fear of offending the Hispanic vote when they make up under 15% of the population, imagine how paranoid they’ll be when they’re 20 or 25%. Think we have a hard time getting them to listen to us on immigration now? We won’t be able to deport a single illegal immigrant.
So the only solution is to stem the tide. If both parties are beholden to a single ethnic group now, importing dozens of millions of members of that group will be even more divisive.
I already left the GOP back in December 2012. So…
Martel- I’m not sure you understand the pro-immigration case. It’s not that immigration is the key to Winn a majority of Hispanic votes. It’s that it’s an anchor which prevents us from getting more than about 30% of the Hispanic vote. As I’ve written above, if you don’t think conservatism can appeal to Hispanics in the absence of the immigration issue, you’re basically saying conservatism can never win another national election. If you believe that I can understand fighting a rearguard action for working class whites, but let’s be clear: it’s a losing strategy.
Define “affiliated” please. Sorry, but the confusion of Trump supporters between the National Council of La Raza and the judge’s bar association requires these “inconvenient” questions. You’re up.
Conservatism can win over Hispanics, but not unlike just every other immigrant group to come here, it takes a couple of generations to wean new immigrants away from Democrats. We don’t have that much time.
But unlike with previous immigrants, Democrats have now mastered the politics of grievance and division. Goldwater and Nixon made a couple of apparent missteps with blacks, and we now get trounced with them.
So even if we “wise up” on immigration, we’ll still be accused of racism or hostility to Spanish or heartlessness in criminal justice or welfare, and we’ve no idea how to counter any of it.
And trying to court an ethnicity by not offending it doesn’t work. We bend over backwards to keep our rhetoric regarding blacks as mild as possible and get almost none of their votes.
Spot on. Best to have no comment when Trump is being Trump otherwise the DNC media auxiliary will pin you down about every remark forever.
Send a few letters to Fox News; they employ a La Raza Lawyers Association-affiliated person as an anchor, which makes them affiliated-affiliated.
As for Jim Geraghty’s article, it’s interesting reading, and explains why Kevin Williamson said what he did. Or one can just say NR is dogfood and its writers all curs, I suppose.
Could you provide an example of this? Last year the Republican Party had more than a small debate about whether flying the Confederate flag on public lands was a good thing. I don’t see the GOP “bending over backwards” to appeal to black votes. I actually don’t see us trying to appeal to them at all.
I’m not saying we should try specifically appeal to minority voters, but I think the idea that we’ve been trying to in any meaningful way is laughable.
Hoyacon – I’m not a Trump supporter, man. I voted for Ted Cruz in the New York primary. But I’m not a #NeverTrumper, because I perceive them as mostly made up of amnesty supporters wrapped in self-righteousness.
James Lileks: OK, maybe we can agree that it would be a good thing if Romney got into the race.
Your final sentence is correct, but it doesn’t contradict my point about inoffensive rhetoric. Examples include:
Using the mealy-mouthed nonsensical “African-American” almost to a person.
Nikki Haley and Tim Scott very publicly renouncing the Confederate flag on the state capital steps.
Drumming Trent Lott out of his position for his stupid Throm Thurmond comments.
Dropping virtually any mention of “welfare queens” or black criminality from it’s messaging since Bush Sr.
Paul Ryan dropping all mention of his poverty investigation the moment somebody somewhere said it was racist.
Michelle Bachman immediately backing down on her claim that two-parent families are better for kids after Whoopee Goldberg claimed she hated single moms and implied it was racist.
That’s not to say that we’ve done any effective outreach in the black community whatsoever, but do we have any reason to believe that we’d do a better job with Hispanics?
I suspect that more boldly attacking the problems in the black community (and not just over-reliance on big government) would be far more effective than portraying them as victims. Yes, for all our talk about “personal responsibility,” as the left claims blacks are victims of racism, we counter that they’re mere victims of leftism. As far as boldly attacking the negative elements in the black community in such a way as to get decent blacks to disassociate themselves from them, if we even try we’re putrid at it.
And so it will be increasingly with Hispanics. Democrats will have outreach centers and talking points that run circles around ours, and we’ll perpetually play defense and try to convince people we don’t really hate them. And Republicans who talk the right talk on immigration will never be as popular as the Democrats, although they might be more popular than other Republicans.
When any Republican anywhere says anything that might be construed as anti-Hispanic or anti-immigrant, it will be played on Univision repeatedly, and Republicans will be tainted as racist no matter how loudly they denounce the statement.
There are ways to beat this, but I see absolutely nothing about the GOP to show me they’d use them.
This is only an issue because Trump brought up the Trump University case himself, at one of his rallies, completely unprompted. It didn’t burn out because Trump was continuing to talk about it, and telling his surrogates to talk about it, even though it’s an unflattering distraction from his presidential campaign. The “linguini spines” only ended up talking about it because Trump wouldn’t stop talking about it. Regardless of whether or not it’s racist, Trump shouldn’t have talked about it because it serves no useful political purpose whatsoever.
But it does.
It’s hard not to be perceived as self-righteous when you’re on the righteous side of things.
I don’t think the other things you’ve mentioned are examples of bending over backwards but I want to take particular issue with this. The Confederacy was evil. It was antithetical to our nation. The idea that the Confederate flag should not fly on public land should be uncontroversial among all Americans.
I await the agry denounciations.
Oh well, that commitment lasted six hours.
I’m incredibly glad that the Confederacy lost, and although I think it was fundamentally flawed, it was also more than just a bunch of evil black-haters.
Nevertheless, whether or not it was the right thing to do, Haley and Scott renouncing the Confederate flag on the state capital steps was a definite attempt to show that the GOP isn’t racist. (I also agree with throwing out Trent Lott.)
But the point is we’re perpetually trying to show how racist we’re not and perpetually failing at it. On this issue (as with so many others) we’re content to play defense, content to deflect the occasional accusation instead of landing some punches of our own.
Sharpton and his ilk have done immeasurably more harm to blacks than Republicans, yet we’re supposedly the bad guys. This happens because although we occasionally deflect an attack, we’re afraid to hit back.
For any attack we might launch could somehow be branded as racist.
And there’s no evidence we’ll change.
Something I’ve been coming to realize over the last year or so is the problem is not the efforts of Republican politicians to demonstrate that the party isn’t racist. It’s that a big chunk of the party opposes those efforts because – wait for it – they’re a bit racist.
Haley was widely criticized on the right for removing the confederate flag. Some of it was certainly people who object to PC, but most seemed to be from people wanting to celebrate the Confederacy.
No, it doesn’t. I disagree with the gentlemen at JAG. There is a vastly simpler explanation which has greater explanatory power.
Trump’s discussion of the case and the judge presiding over it has absolutely nothing to do with politics; it is motivated entirely by his narcissism. That is, Trump is highly emotionally invested in his identity of being a winner. Yet, Trump also believes that he is going to lose this case, thus showing he is not a winner. Trump needs to tell a story, purely for his own psycological well being, that explains why he is a winner despite the fact that he lost. Thus, Mexican Judge becomes the villain of a story, where Mexican Judge cheats and punishes Trump for The Wall. Even though the case is about whether Trump defrauded people and has been going on since 2014 before Trump ever spoke of The Wall.
I think that explanation is a lot more believable than the idea that Trump is involved in some kind of three dimensional chess against the politically correct left, employing magical judo in using their own tools against them, even if he doesn’t know it. The JAG people want to believe that, because they want to play that kind of chess game themselves. Trump isn’t ideological enough to.
I will never apologize for who I am, where I’m from, or who my ancestors were. Deo Vindice.
I don’t think that’s any more accurate than perceiving Trump supporters as ignorant alt-righters.
Ann Coulter seemed to think highly of the man, no?
For at least a couple of decades there, whether or not anyone in the party was racist, they had virtually no say in how things were run or our overall messaging. When they said something stupid, they were condemned.
But even if some are “a bit racist,” Democrats harm blacks far, far, far more than Republicans, yet Republicans get almost all the blame among blacks for their ills. This means our messaging is off by a ton.
And it’s not because we’re not being nice enough.
So promoting a flag causes more harm than fostering a culture of dependency, letting criminals roam wild, crappy schools run by unions, etc?
Even if you’re right about GOP racism, there’s still no excuse.
I’m not sure anyone is asking you to. You’re being asked not to celebrate an evil institution. That’s it.
That’s some impressive goalpost shifting.
If he’s an idiot narcissist, what does that say about all the people he keeps beating?
It’s not easy for somebody with no political experience (even a celebrity) to run for president against candidates with entire teams of people who’ve devoted their entire lives to politics, and beat them handily.
I’ll grant that he sometimes comes across as stupid, but he seems to understand something that none of the experts do.
Hardly. My initial contention is that Republicans are clueless when it comes to black outreach, largely because it’s always on the defensive and tries to play nice all the time. That hasn’t changed.
You’ve rebutted my point not in the slightest, instead condemning the Confederacy and that the problem is actual GOP racism.
I reply that even if we actually were racist, Democrats do actual harm. We suck at conveying that.
And I bet Democrats are more racist anyway.
He didn’t beat them handily, at least not until after Wisconsin. He’s the weakest GOP nominee put forward in a long time. If he was a strong strategic genius, he would have have sown the nomination up right after March 1, the way that most nominees have. He was a big beneficiary of a divided field that assumed he wasn’t a serious contender.
Even then, being a narcissist doesn’t preclude him from doing well. It just means that, at least some of the time, he acts to protect his identity instead of in pursuit of a political objective. It also doesn’t make him an idiot.