Backing off his call for mass deportations of illegal immigrants, Republican Donald Trump is attempting to pivot from some of his inflammatory rhetoric and begin courting minority voters he’ll need to win a general election showdown against Democrat Hillary Clinton.
The pivot is not an easy maneuver to pull off gracefully, and Mr. Trump almost immediately encountered resistance from the left and the right, with both sides saying he couldn’t be trusted.
The Trump campaign forged ahead, seeking inroads to minority communities long dominated by the Democratic Party.
Mr. Trump’s son, Eric Trump, said that the billionaire businessman plans to appeal to minority voters with his economic and immigration messages, which he said should resonate with those usually loyal Democratic voters who have suffered most in President Obama’s economy.
“Those communities are, quite frankly, the communities that are hardest hit by [Hillary Clinton’s] reckless policies and [President Obama’s] reckless policies,” he said on Fox News, noting that roughly 57 percent of inner-city youth are out of work.
“It’s also very telling when you want to bring in hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees when you have 57 percent unemployment,” said the younger Mr. Trump. “That to me is a big blunder, and something she is going to have to answer for.”
The figure he cited was the ratio of unemployed to the entire black youth population. The unemployment rate, which only counts people actively looking for work, was 27 percent for black youths in May.
Ada M. Fisher, a Republican National Committee member from North Carolina, said that there is an opening for Mr. Trump with black voters, especially young black voters who need jobs and could be receptive to his message on trade and the economy.
“It will resonate in their pocketbooks, and people vote their pocketbooks more than anything else,” said Ms. Fisher, who is the only black female member of the RNC.
Mr. Trump clinched the GOP presidential nomination with tough talk on immigration, including promising to throw out the roughly 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., build a huge wall on the border with Mexico and temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country.
Those positions drew accusations that he was a racist and a bigot, and it drove off minority voters who are already leery of Republicans.
Mrs. Clinton holds a commanding lead among minority voters, including winning 87 percent of the black vote and 69 percent of the Latino vote in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted last week.
The real estate tycoon likely will have to coax back some of those voters, as well as improve his standing with women, in order to win in November.
He advanced the effort by saying people are going to find out he has “the biggest heart of anybody.”
“President Obama has mass-deported vast numbers of people — the most ever, and it’s never reported,” he said in a weekend interview at his golf course in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. “I think people are going to find that I have not only the best policies, but I will have the biggest heart of anybody.”
He said that he would no longer characterize his plan as a mass deportation.
“I would not call it mass deportations. We are going to get rid of a lot of bad dudes who are here. That I can tell you,” he said.
Mr. Trump hasn’t retreated from his plan to build a wall, which is a cornerstone of his campaign. But he has softened his rhetoric about banning Muslims from the U.S., going back and forth between calling for a total ban to one targeting countries that are breeding grounds for terrorists.
His repositioning on mass deportations provoked swift rebukes from liberal activists and conservatives, who both said Mr. Trump couldn’t be trusted.
“Donald Trump has made it clear that he supports deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country. That’s the definition of mass deportation,” said Lizet Ocampo, director of Latino organizing for the liberal group People for the American Way.
“No matter how many times Trump claims that ’Hispanics love me,’ we know that Trump has spent his entire campaign stirring up anti-immigrant fears and harming our communities at every turn, from calling immigrants ’rapists’ and ’criminals’ to bragging about the ’deportation force’ he’ll create to carry out his mass deportation plan,” she said.
Conservative activist Ken Crow said that Mr. Trump’s “flip-flop” on mass deportations had enraged conservative who were beginning to warm to the idea of him as the GOP standard-bearer.
“They are saying that Trump is just likely Romney,” he said, referring to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. “’Trump’s a moderate. He’s not what they said he was.’ That’s what they’re saying.”
• Seth McLaughlin contributed to this report.
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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