Trump’s immigration whisperer

*Trump’s immigration policies aren’t his own. This is the guy who feeds him ideas and one-liners. VL

By Glenn Thrush, Off Message (9 minute read)

TOPEKA, Kan. — Kris Kobach is only 50, but he’s the closest thing the fractured Republican Party has to an ideological godfather on the two most galvanizing issues in the conservative arsenal: immigration and voting rights.

Much of what Donald Trump will say on those two topics at tonight’s third and final general election debate has been influenced, in one form or another, from Kobach’s law book-strewn second-floor office in the Kansas secretary of state’s imposing, Renaissance Revival-style headquarters in downtown Topeka.

. . . the Harvard- and Yale-trained attorney-intellectual is a high-yield, right-wing policy farm: He almost single-handedly championed Arizona and Alabama’s clampdown immigration laws and promoted the idea of immigrant “self-deportation” that Mitt Romney embraced in 2012 — which Trump used to argue was politically stupid, at least until Kobach came up with a plan that could (in his view) force Mexico to actually pay for The Wall.

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“The wall is not my idea,” said Kobach, who has been talking with Trump about immigration, on and off, since the New Hampshire primary. “Where I have offered some input on the wall proposition or policy is on this issue of, you know, is it possible to force Mexico to pay for it, and the answer is yes, actually.” READ MORE