CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well the Trump interview was extremely interesting. He's extremely good at this. Because he dances and he dekes, and he feints and then he disappears without backing down, When you asked him about, for example, about his critique of the Romney plan, which was self-deportation -- which is a lot softer than a forcible deportation, which he's advocating now, and you said “Well, didn't you say it was crazy and mean-spirited?” He denied ever having said it was mean-spirited. Well, in fact he did.
BRET BAIER: Yeah, we've got the quote, actually. From 2012, a NewsMax interview. “Republicans didn't have anything go for them with respect to Latinos, and with respect to Asians, the Democrats didn't have a policy for dealing with illegal immigrants. What they did have going for them is they weren't mean-spirited about it.” He was asked about Romney: “Romney had a crazy policy of self-deportation which was maniacal, it sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote, he lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”
KRAUTHAMMER: And in one of your questions, you tried to give him a pathway out of this by saying what, you know “Has something changed in the last four years, that would account for your complete about-face? Where were you to the left of Romney, and now are you way to the right of where Romney was, by calling for forced deportation?” And he didn't take it. He simply, it's so you've got to ask yourself, what kind of revelation did he have? That made a guy who essentially said, you know, that Romney had lost everybody who was inspired to come into the country. A very pro-immigration statement. And now ending up way to the right on this. And actually introducing, because he's a front-runner, he's made this issue, which was way off the table, the central issue, deportation or not. It used to be citizenship, or a work permit, do you get to vote? What kind of barriers you want to have at the border, to ensure there's no more illegal immigration. But now the debate is deportation, we've never had that.
