Being "erratic" is not a good quality for a presidential candidate, and Donald Trump's sudden decision to travel to Mexico City for a meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto is not a good sign, Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign, said Wednesday.
"We saw a similar kind of stop and start moment when John McCain in 2008 was trying to decide whether or not he was going to do the first debate, when the economic crisis hit," Stevens, now a columnist for The Daily Beast, told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program.
According to The Washington Post, Trump was first invited late last week to visit Mexico. His campaign's new CEO, Steve Bannon, the previous chief executive at Breitbart News, took a key role in working out the details for the Wednesday trip while Trump and his aides and family met on Sunday at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, NJ.
According to people briefed on the meeting, Bannon made the push to the group for a gesture such as the trip to Mexico to cement his immigration views.
Stevens ridiculed that scenario during his "Morning Joe" appearance.
"It just never comes across the quality you want in a president that you're sitting in a room and a guy from Breitbart says, 'Let's go to Mexico,' and you're off," Stevens said. "This usually starts in a fraternity house and ends in a jail in Mexico [with] negotiations to get him back across.
"I don't see that it really exhibits these qualities that people want in a president. It's almost as if they woke up and realized, 'We're running against a former secretary of state. Our guy used to do the Miss Universe pageant around the world, maybe we should try to heavy this up.'"
Stevens also slammed Trump's previous calls to deport 11 million illegal immigrants from the United States and said it's a position he'll have to abandon.
"You take 11 million people out of the economy, and the best you can hope for is the worst recession we've ever seen and we'd probably have a depression," Stevens said. "These 11 million people are walking around spending money, buying things, getting paid for jobs. They're paying taxes in their paychecks. He keeps talking about how they don't pay taxes; they do."
Further, a mass deportation would be "madness," and when someone is running for president and proposes "an idea that nobody thinks is serious," that can have limits on that candidate's "upside," Stevens said.
The former Romney strategist also discussed the last-minute campaign of independent candidate Evan McMullin, and he thinks the candidate marks an alternative for people who don't want to vote for Trump.
"He's a very serious person," Stevens said. "He is somebody who is answering this call and there's so many Americans out there who say we would like a center right candidate that we can vote for who can speak to these issues. Someone that who we can affirm …[he is] on to look to and say 'that is somebody you can admire and serve this country.' That's all good to me."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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