“I don’t know,” Donald Trump replied when NBC’s Kristen Welker asked him if, when it comes to immigration enforcement, he’d “uphold the Constitution of the United States as president.”
The Leftmedia, as they love to say about Republicans, pounced.
“Trump, asked if he has to ‘uphold the Constitution,’ says, ‘I don’t know,’” read NBC’s headline. The New York Times said, “Trump Says ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked About Due Process and Upholding Constitution.” Politico got the memo: “When asked if he needs to uphold the Constitution, Trump says: ‘I don’t know.’” The same went for many other Leftmedia outlets. Even The Wall Street Journal used the same formulation.
As Mark Alexander responded, “You can’t blame the media when Trump misses an opportunity to predicate a rambling answer to a question with a clear and concise answer to the question asked.”
But hold on a minute. Back up that truck.
The setup for this was that Trump, unlike Joe Biden, has made the media rounds lately, interviewing with hostile reporters at The Atlantic, Time Magazine, ABC News, and now NBC News. Biden didn’t do many interviews, period, much less with Fox News or any more conservative outlets. Antagonistic reporters tend to ask oppositional questions, and that can snare even the best interviewee. Biden was cognitively disabled, while Trump thrives in the contest.
Kristen Welker is the left-wing activist NBC trotted out for this latest interview. She challenged the president on numerous issues, which, to be clear, is the job of the press. It’s not the press’s role to be the propaganda arm of one political party, though it clearly is.
Welker eventually got to the immigration exchange I began by highlighting. Her first question was this: “Border crossings are at their lowest level ever recorded. Is the border now secure?” It was a gotcha, however, because she wasn’t interested in Trump’s answer reflecting well on him. She wanted to pin him down on why the emergency order is still in effect: “When will you know that the emergency is over? Are you planning to lift it at some point? Is it necessary?”
Trump pivoted to exactly the right place — activist judges blocking his deportations. “The biggest emergency is the courts,” he said. “The big emergency right now is that we have thousands of people that we want to take out, and we have some judges that want everybody to go to court.”
After some back-and-forth, he added, “If the courts don’t allow us to take people out, if we had to have a court case every single — think of it. Every single person — we have millions of people. If you have millions of court cases, figure two weeks a court case, it would be 300 years.”
Predictably, Welker brought up the Left’s favorite new martyr — the wife-beating MS-13 gang member illegal alien deported to his home country of El Salvador, a.k.a. “Maryland Man.” Yes, there are questions of due process surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia and all other illegals, but Trump has a point about the infeasibility of enforcement.
Still, Welker kept pressing Trump on due process, pointing to comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Fifth Amendment. She dropped what she thought was the hammer: “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
“I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
The correct answer is, “Of course. I swore an oath to ‘support and defend’ the Constitution, and we’re working to do that.” Trump rarely says the expected thing, though I think he meant roughly just that. He knew it was a gotcha question, and he went straight to resetting the debate and challenging the media narrative.
I don’t recall anyone asking Joe Biden if his open border was a good example of upholding the Constitution. Biden and Kamala Harris allowed an invasion of at least 10 million illegals, and they abandoned law enforcement and effectively rewrote the law to do it. As a result, Trump has a very real crisis on his hands. Welker could have asked him how he was planning to address the constitutional crisis bequeathed to him by his predecessor.
Indeed, Trump offered an answer to this, saying, “We have thousands of people that are … some of the worst people on Earth. … I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.”
The media would rather portray this as a constitutional crisis that Trump created.
Trump has his work cut out for him. Biden left him a crisis on the border and one in the courtroom. Biden appointed 235 judges at various levels, including one justice of the Supreme Court. Barack Obama appointed 329, including two justices. Democrats don’t pick judges based on their commitment to the Constitution but on the preferred policy outcomes that benefit the Democrat Party. Heck, one of their judges thwarted law enforcement in trying to hide an illegal alien, and Democrats feigned outrage that the judge was arrested.
I’d truly love it if the federal government returned to only constitutional functions. Frankly, neither party wants that.
Would I prefer that Trump were better at precisely following due process while dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s? Would I rather he not always fight fire with fire? Yes, in a perfect world.
But Democrats have ensured we don’t live in that world. They not only destroyed the border but thoroughly corrupted our institutions — all three branches of the federal government, numerous state governments, and Hollywood and academia to boot. They refuse to enforce the law, and the laws they pass are unconstitutional abominations. They seemingly ruin everything they touch.
Yet the Leftmedia uniformly acts as if the Bad Orange Man deporting “Maryland Man” to his home country is what’s going to cause our “democracy” to collapse in a heap of ruins. I’d laugh if it weren’t so appalling.
