Donald Trump kicked off Labor Day by pivoting yet again on immigration.
On a day when he barnstormed Ohio like a conquering hero, the Republican nominee left open the possibility of a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants and indicated a desire to move on from the issue.
In an interview with reporters on his jet, somewhere over north-eastern Ohio, Trump insisted that while anyone seeking to become a citizen was “going to have to get out and come back in through the process”, he was “not ruling out anything” when it came those who remained in the US.
“We are going to make that decision into the future. That decision will be made.
“Our first thing will be to get all the bad elements out, the gang members, secure the border, stop the drugs from coming in.
“You know what I talk about more than anything else is jobs. We’ve been talking about immigration … if I didn’t bring up immigration, you guys wouldn’t have been talking about it. Immigration is a huge problem. I’ve proved that and I’ll solve that problem. But the thing I am going to be best at is jobs, at renegotiating trade deals, which are a disaster.”
As the Republican nominee later declared in his in-flight interview “it’s all about jobs … The immigration position is so clear and so well announced – we gotta stop the drugs, we gotta stop criminality, get rid of the bad ones, and a lot of them are bad – it’s really now so much talking about jobs because our country has been destroyed by other countries taking our jobs.”
Less than a week earlier Trump had given a hardline immigration speech, proclaiming firmly: “There will be no amnesty” and insisting “anyone who enters the United States illegally is subject to deportation, otherwise we don’t have a country.”
But surrogates appearing on Sunday shows made his position sound more nuanced. The former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump confidante, told CNN he had left “a very big opening for what will happen with the people that remain here in the United States after the criminals are removed and after the border is secure”.
On Monday Trump seemed eager to focus on jobs in blue-collar Ohio communities. Starting with a roundtable with union members outside Cleveland, then making a retail stop before being mobbed by crowds at a county fair outside Youngstown, Trump bathed in the adulation – the New York City real estate mogul transformed into a working-class hero.
At the roundtable, introduced by Tom Coyne, the Democratic mayor of Brook Park, Ohio who cast his first Republican vote for Trump in March’s presidential primaries, the nominee bemoaned the fact that Mexico and China were taking American jobs. As he told reporters later: “They are taking our jobs like Grant took Richmond.”
He criticised Barack Obama over his visit to China where the G20 hosts didn’t “give him stairs, the proper stairs to get out”. The “metal staircase” Obama descended was attached to Air Force One. “[If it] were me I’d say you know what folks, I respect you a lot, but let’s get out of here.”
Voters in Ohio seemed to warm to his style. At a county fair in traditionally Democratic Mahoning County, Trump was mobbed as he briefly walked through the crowd. The Republican nominee smiled and waved as infatuated Ohioans shouted “We love you Donald” and even shrieked in glee.
Adulation in Ohio, maybe – but Trump faces as a tough battle as he lags in national and state polls. Looking ahead to the debates, he pledged that barring “hurricanes [or] natural disaster, I expect to do all three. I look forward to the debates. I think it is an important element of what we’re doing. I think you have an obligation to do the debates.”
He confirmed that he was not engaging in traditional preparation – no mock debates, no one playing Hillary Clinton. “I’ve seen people do so much prep work that when they got out there they can’t speak.”
The first debate between Trump and Clinton takes place on 26 September.
