Bill O’Reilly: ‘Step Back a Little and See What Happens’ As Trump Negotiates Immigration Reform

Donald Trump and Bill O'Reilly attend the game between the New York Knicks and the Clevela
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Bill O’Reilly joined SirusXM host Raheem Kassam on Thursday’s Breitbart News Daily to talk about his new book, Killing England: The Brutal Struggle for American Independence, co-authored with Martin Dugard. The current state of immigration reform was also a prominent topic of discussion.

“We decided to write a book that showed how brutal the struggle was for our freedoms that we have today,” O’Reilly said. “But in order to do that, you had to say who George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin actually were as people, as men. They were like all human beings: some strengths, some weaknesses.”

He said there was no question in his mind that the radical left is working to slander the great figures in American history and obliterate their monuments because “it’s the Constitution that they ultimately want to overturn.”

“The statues are just a wayside to get to the Constitution. They’re basically saying America is a bad country. White supremacy is how it was established. The Constitution is based on white supremacy,” he explained.

“All of this is the belief system of the far left. They don’t ever say it, but that’s what it is. The statues are just symbols. I said very early on, when I saw this controversy in Charlottesville, hey, it’s not going to stop with Robert E. Lee or the Confederate generals. This is going to go into the fabric of our country and who we really are as a people because the far left thinks that we’re a bad country. Traditional conservative Americans think we’re a noble country.”

“That’s always been the struggle. I urge people to read Killing England to get an idea what these people were really like – Washington, Jefferson, Franklin – so then, you can make an argument that, hey, just because you were a slave owner back in the late eighteenth century doesn’t negate all the heroic things that you did. That’s the argument, so I’m trying to get some perspective here. It extends into DACA. It extends into every issue we’re dealing with today,” said O’Reilly.

O’Reilly said this visceral hatred of American history is a core element of both far-left and far-right ideologies. “To me, though, they used to be marginalized in this country, the fringe, but now the far-left fringe has gained traction,” he warned.

“That’s what people are seeing, and that’s why they’re so angry. That’s why Trump got elected: because the insanity of saying to the world, ‘America is a bad country based on racism’ – which is what the Colin Kaepernick thing is all about, all the controversies we have today stem back to the original founding of the nation,” he argued. “The radical left believes that this is a bad country from the jump, and they have to change it into this socialistic, communist paradise. That’s what the struggle is.”

“I think people have to realize [is] number one, how severe the problem has become and number two, that it’s going to take courage to fight it,” O’Reilly said. “I’m the poster boy for that. I’ve been under attack for 16 years, and finally, these forces of evil and darkness got me. It was a confluence of events that someday all of it will be exposed.”

“People are going to have to have courage to stand up and say, ‘Enough. We don’t believe our country is evil. We don’t believe that white supremacy rules in the White House.’ Unless we are willing to do that and make a sacrifice – because when you do that, you’re going to be attacked, and that’s why it’s important to read Killing England and see what Washington, in particular, George Washington went through, the suffering of the man, what he had to go through to make this Revolution a reality,” he said.

“We all have our mini-Revolutions here, and we’re going to have to stand up and stop this madness. It is madness. It has reached this point. The Trump election demonstrated the folks are sick of it, but now the folks are going to have to make, individually, decisions to speak out against it,” O’Reilly said.

Kassam asked for O’Reilly’s take on President Trump’s reported amnesty deal with Democratic leaders, which he joked had some Trump voters thinking it would be necessary to Make Trump Great Again before Trump can fulfill his campaign promise to Make America Great Again.

O’Reilly responded by advising everyone to “step back for a moment and wait until the facts emerge.”

“What’s happening now – and this is a tactic of the far left – Schumer and Pelosi understand that the fastest way to destroy Donald Trump is to get his base angry at him,” O’Reilly elaborated. That’s fact number one. Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer want Trump’s base to be angry with him and feel betrayed. That’s where you start. So any meeting and any dinner, anything, they’re going to come out, those two, and spin it like ‘Trump is giving in to us.’ That’s fact number two, which is exactly what they did last night.”

“We don’t know what Donald Trump is going to do about DACA. We don’t know,” he pointed out. “We don’t know what the legislation is going to look like. We don’t know anything about it. So I would urge your audience to be a little constrained right now and wait and see. Wait and see.”

“Yes, you want the wall. I supported the wall. Trump’s going to find a way to secure that border. He’s already done a pretty good job down there in six months. Give him a little credit for that,” O’Reilly advised.

“Whether it’s a wall to wall, San Diego to Brownsville – it’s probably not going to be that, but there’s going to be portions of a wall there. On the DACA front, they’re not going to deport 800,000 people. That’s impossible. It’s not going to happen, and it’s not fair, either. George Washington wouldn’t have done it,” he contended.

“But there has to be a compromise made wherein these 800,000 are going to have to go through a stringent background check and regulations in order to stay and work,” he added. “At the same time, the Democratic Party is going to have to agree that sanctuary cities and all this other business are done. You are going to have to obey federal law.”

“The compromises can be made. I would urge everybody who supports Donald Trump to step back a little and see what happens. Remember, Trump has the power. He has the power. He can do executive orders to make things happen. Pelosi and Schumer don’t have it. What Pelosi and Schumer do have is the press. They play to the press, which gets everybody hysterical,” he said.

O’Reilly said he encourages passion from those who voted for Trump because they liked his rule-of-law stance on immigration reform, but added he does not endorse “blanket insanity.”

“If you think 800,000 people are going to be deported, who came here because their parents dragged them here, that’s not going to happen,” he repeated. “It’s not. So accept it.”

Kassam suggested Trump voters might be willing to accept permanent status for those 800,000 if it were “tied to the border wall itself,” but that seems to be off the table.

“I don’t know if it’s going to be a border wall per se, but that doesn’t mean Trump can’t build the wall,” O’Reilly countered. “Because he will. He has to. But it has to be tied to tighter restrictions on immigration. It has to.”

Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Eastern.

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