Fox News Host Dana Perino Rips Donald Trump’s Immigration Plan [Video]
In another anti-Donald Trump rant, Dana Perino, the co-host of the high-rated The Five panel show on the Fox News Channel, slammed the GOP presidential front-runner’s immigration plan as “totally unworkable, and impractical, and it will never happen.”
She declared that Trump was “selling people a bill of goods to make them feel better” because outsourced jobs aren’t coming back to America, and Mexicans won’t build the wall. Parenthetically, Trump’s plan calls for Mexico to pay for the wall at the southern border.
Back in June, Perino had an uncharacteristic meltdown about Trump when she accused co-host Eric Bolling of defending the billionaire businessman and ex-reality TV show star’s candidacy merely because Bolling was angling to get on The Celebrity Apprentice. At the time, Perino’s allegation prompted a huge backlash on Facebook which included demands that she apologize to Bolling. It’s unclear if an apology ever took place.
It’s almost as if Dana Perino is now performing that old vaudeville “Niagara Falls” routine (popularized back in the day by The Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello) with the words “Donald Trump” substituted for Niagara Falls.
Perino heretofore has been the soft-spoken voice of reason on the show, but regular viewers have noticed in the last few months that the well-known dog lover has seemingly become a shrill and overly aggressive pit bull, as it were, presumably for the presidential candidacy of Jeb Bush or a similar candidate favored by the so-called GOP establishment. Perino served as White House press secretary (i.e., the administration’s primary spokesperson) under President George W. Bush.
Conspiracy theorists, for what that’s worth, if anything, speculate that Fox News executives have passed the word down the food chain to undermine Trump’s chances to capture the 2016 Republican nomination again in favor of a more establishment-type or PC nominee.
This time around, Dana Perino’s adversary was the irreverent, playful Jesse Watters — who also sparred with Gerald Rivera on the same broadcast — in the center chair on the set, and, as such, was sitting in for Bolling.
Watters is the not-totally-serious dude who orchestrates the satirical “Watters’ World” man/woman-on-the-street segments for The O’Reilly Factor.
Watch the clip embedded below and draw your own conclusions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjGnjiRVeQc
As far as mass deportations of illegal aliens in particular and ending birthright citizenship, Watters challenged Perino if she was really surprised that any campaigning politician would make promises upon which he would be later unable to deliver.
Conventional wisdom on both the right and the left is that language in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…” automatically confers American citizenship on a child of an illegal alien born on U.S. soil. They contend that only an amendment to the amendment — a very laborious, near-impossible task — can address the issue.
Dissenters to the generally accepted legal doctrine insist that persons born in America to illegal alien parents are “subject to the jurisdiction” of their home country, and thus outside the scope of the 14th Amendment, which was enacted after the Civil War to declare then-newly freed slaves as citizens of the United States.
Perino also slammed Trump for harshly vowing to rescind President Obama’s executive order granting amnesty for so-called “DREAMERs.” In June 2012, Obama on his own authority suspended the deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program of about one million undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. These immigrants are often referred to as “DREAMers” after the DREAM Act that was never voted into law by Congress. Under Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution, however, Congress alone is vested with the power to regulate immigration.
Watters spoke approvingly of “75 percent” of the Donald Trump plan that includes protecting the border, and protecting U.S. jobs, defunding sanctuary cities, and adding manpower to the Border Patrol. Citing Kelly Osbourne’s racist remark on The View, he accused liberals of crying “crocodile tears” over the prospects of deportations.
He also joked that NBC Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd, who challenged Trump about his immigration plan in a recent interview, should house illegal immigrants in his mansion and, with tongue in cheek, Watters claimed that he favored a process where undocumented workers could physically help build Trump’s wall in exchange for amnesty.
Proclaiming his “love” for Donald Trump, Rivera chimed in that the real estate mogul’s immigration plan is nonetheless a “farce.”
Perino concluded her remarks by recommending viewers take a look at a comprehensive critique of the Trump immigration plan by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that generally favors open borders.
Who do you think got the better of the debate over the Donald Trump immigration plan, Dana Perino or Jesse Watters?
[Photo by Chris McKay/Getty Images Entertainment]
