Trump Flip Flop: It helps him

Trump is re-describing his immigration policy

Trump's people are not calling it a flip-flop.  They are describing it as affirming American borders and the rule of law.   Donald Trump will enforce the law and deport illegal people.

Some critics say this is essentially the policy of Obama, the reporter-in-chief, but it misses two important things.   Trump's tone is one of exclusion and protection and while Obama is looking for excuses to let people stay.  People see and get the difference: Trump is the anti-immigrant one, the one who wants to protect the customary normal Americans from those outsiders.   And Trump's people have once again raised the issue of changing the 14th Amendment, or at least the interpretation of it, to end birthright citizenship.   Birthright citizenship is a leaky hole in the boat of American exclusion and Trump wants to plug it.

Reminder:  The Amendment begins: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." 

The Dred Scott decision had said that black people were not citizens and could never be citizens.  They might have been here for 6 generations but they weren't citizens because of their racial/ethnic identity.  This Amendment was intended to address that issue and resolve it: if you are born here you are a citizen (unless you were the child of a foreign diplomat or a child of an invading army or otherwise were not subject to American laws.)  Citizenship depends upon birth place, not race.   Race as the basis for who is inside the American tent is an old, deep, issue in America, a basis for continuing slavery, a justification for the removal of Indians, the basis for excluding Chinese and other Asians, the social justification for Black Codes, for Jim Crow policies, and legal segregation of the races.    The 14th Amendment was a line in the sand that attempted, in 1868, that way of American thinking.  It codified something in the law, but it did not fundamentally change American thinking.

This actually helps Trump

The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s supposedly resolved it, putting meaning and enforcement into the 14th Amendment, but it, too, was incomplete.  Many American welcome the use of ethnicity, not place, as the basis for inclusion and exclusion.  Trump addresses that desire; Hillary Clinton condemns it.

Trump's people bringing up the notion of re-interpreting the 14th Amendment will seem like a trivial little legal point to many, but the implications of it are profound.  He will have a difficult legal case, but the fact that it is at issue demonstrates that this ancient unresolved problem in America persists.   The Amendment has been interpreted as saying exactly what it means by the Supreme Court, which looked at a case where a person of Chinese ethnicity faced exclusion.  They resolved it cleanly:  if you are born here you are an American citizen, even if you are of Chinese ethnicity.  

The ancient American issue: exclusion by race and ethnicity 

There is room to debate what is meant by "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" but Trump's political case conflicts with his legal one.  Trump is asserting that people here illegally are most certainly subject to American laws which is why they can be arrested and deported.  This complicates the notion that children of those people are not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, because the political case argues the direct opposite.   But lawyers are clever and can find ways, which Trump says they should, and it is conceivable that a different Supreme Court could reverse itself.

Trump is not hiding from the notion that his position is evolving.  Trump's brand identity includes the notion of spontaneity and flexibility and lack of any real commitment to policy, so the evolution in Trump's thinking does not destroy his brand.  (Hillary cares about policy, so her change on the TPP was read as politically motivated and hypocritical.)

The media is assisting Trump in his re-brand into the kinder, gentler "presidential" Trump because they are covering him extensively and describing the change, even as he maintains the position of being anti-immigrant.  Voters hesitant to vote for Trump because he is a racist or a cruel bully or because he has impossibly impractical views on issues including immigration have a reason to rethink their hesitation.  They can think:  possibly Trump's opposition to immigration is really about law enforcement, not racism.  Possibly the 14th Amendment business just closes a loophole and stops abusive "anchor babies" and isn't really racism.

This re-thinking helps Trump.

This is the essential Hillary Clinton argument

Hillary's campaign has now centered on the notion that Trump is impossible to elect, that he is too extreme, too un-presidential, he is wild and crazy.   The notion of Trump flip flopping had hurt John Kerry and it hurts Hillary, but it actually helps Trump.  People who sort of like the Trump message of America First and shaking up the system want Trump to change.  

Hillary's case is that Trump is hard-wired unsuitable to be president.  Trump flip flopping, evolving, changing, and pushing re-set refutes that argument.