President Trump said Tuesday that he wants to unite the country from divisiveness dating back to President Clinton’s impeachment, and that immigration problems are much harder to solve than the business challenges he faced before entering the White House.
“Immigration is so easy to solve if it was purely a business matter, but it’s not,” the president said in a lunch with network anchors at the White House. “I think that’s something that I’ve learned maybe more than anything else. You govern with all of the instincts of a businessperson, but you have to add much more heart and soul into your decisions than you would ever have even thought of before.”
In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, Mr. Trump will discuss his plan for border security combined with a proposal to provide a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million illegal immigrant “Dreamers.”
Mr. Trump also told the journalists that he wants to see the country more united.
“I want to bring our country back from a tremendous divisiveness, which has taken [place] not just over one year, over many years — including the Bush years, not just Obama,” Mr. Trump said. “You go back to the Bush years. You go back to the Clinton years.”
Noting Bill Clinton’s impeachment, Mr. Trump said he asked a longtime Democratic senator if the current political climate is the worst he’d seen.
“He said, ’Absolutely not. During the impeachment of Bill Clinton was much worse than this,’” Mr. Trump said. “But … there’s been tremendous divisiveness. Not in the last year, there’s been tremendous divisiveness for many years. I would consider it a great achievement if we could make our country united. If I could unite the country. That’s not an easy thing to do because the views are so divergent.”
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.