The mass-deportation promise is disappearing

The useful part

At the Republican National Midterm Convention in Dallas last week, Vice President JD Vance said, "Under Donald Trump's leadership, we have seen the foreign-born share of our population drop by 3 million people. That's illegal aliens that we sent back home." That is not true, and I wish he hadn't said it. The first sentence appears to round a recent estimate that the total foreign-born population fell by 2.9 million.

How it works

• It's one thing not to mention mass deportation, but quite another to throw out numbers that nobody believes and the government's own public data does not support.
• There could be a million explanations for how that statistic made it into the speech instead of the term "mass deportation" itself.
• The second recasts that estimate as 3 million illegal aliens whom the administration sent home.
• Vance said what he said, and if we are going to be straight shooters with Americans, then we need to hold all our political leaders to the same standard.
• That is especially true when it comes to the base's favorite candidate for the next Republican presidential nomination.

What to take from it

With all due respect to the vice president, who has earned a deep reservoir of trust and support, we still need to be clear-eyed if we are going to build momentum for a mass deportation campaign. My read is that someone ordered them not to speak about mass deportation at the convention, so it may have been hard to come up with something to say in its place.