Salt Lake Tribune · Aug 7, 2017
Clive Crook: The smart way to attack Trump's immigration plan
Guadalupe Chavez, center, and others yell during a protest outside of the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services building in San Francisco, Monday, May 1, 2017. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)It was smart politics for President Donald Trump to endorse the immigration plan proposed by Republican senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue last week. Their plan is badly flawed, but that’s partly beside the point -- because it has little chance of ever being enacted.
The endorsement was smart because it appeals to Trump’s base, and even more because it invited the kind of criticism that weakens his critics. Not for the first time, that invitation proved impossible to resist.