Conciliatory sketchy

Conciliatory sketchy

President Donald Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress was unusual insofar as he adopted a distinctly less combative tone on certain issues, and refrained from his melodramatic oratorical strategy of painting America as a nation facing a dark future in a dangerous world. Most striking in terms of the change in his tenor were his remarks on immigration. Through most of his election campaign, he frequently promised to detain and deport “illegal aliens” and build a wall along the Mexican border to keep “rapists” and drug dealers out. While the Department of Homeland Security has indeed carried out raids against undocumented immigrants in a number of major American cities over the past few weeks, Mr. Trump on Tuesday expressed his willingness to consider a merit-based system, rather than relying on lower-skilled immigrants, which could be achieved through “real and positive immigration reform”. Yet Mr. Trump appeared to blunt the positive impact of this long-awaited softening in his rhetoric on immigration when he announced a proposal to create an office to serve ‘Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement’, apparently a special agency with a mandate to focus on tackling crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. As before, the fact that multiple studies of the demographics of crime suggest that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans has not deterred him from making such xenophobic proposals.
Mr. Trump is also likely to have been alluding to Indian fiscal policies when he spoke of a country that taxed U.S.-made Harley-Davidson motorcycles at a 100% rate. Even though subsequent reports pointed out that the sales of the motorcycle company have grown at a brisk pace of 30% over the past two years in India despite such taxation, it is Mr. Trump’s penchant for flirting with the idea of introducing protectionist measures in U.S. trade policy that is causing alarm in India and elsewhere. It is hard to distinguish how much of Mr. Trump’s attack on the global trade system, which he blames for taking away Americans’ jobs, is bluster, and how much portends actual policy change. For example, among the multiple companies that he named in his speech as firms promising to invest in production lines on U.S. soil since November’s election, fact-checkers discovered that many had already made plans to do so during his predecessor’s time in office. This apparent lack of interest in factual accuracy and specificity on details seemed to echo through other parts of Mr. Trump’s speech — for example, in his glossing over precisely what “historic tax reform” his administration would introduce to enable U.S. companies to be competitive the world over. While many Americans may be willing to tolerate presidential strategies of purposeful equivocation, they are probably hoping that, at the very least, Mr. Trump’s speech may be an inflection point in his evolution toward a more conciliatory ethos.