The American system of government essentially worked this week. It wasn't graceful and it happened under horrific circumstances, but citizen activists informed, reporters reported, voters got word and applied mass pressure, lawmakers used their platforms to influence (yes, even some Republican ones), and coward-in-chief Donald Trump finally retreated on his unconscionable policy of kidnapping children as young as several months old in order stem the flow of asylum seekers to America.
Let's be clear: Our national nightmare is so far from over. We still have a power-hungry miscreant for a president with a depraved and remorseless Cabinet at his disposal and a servile GOP-led Congress that has all but collapsed like a house of cards in our country's hour of need. And even though Trump has temporarily ceased his brutal family separation policy, his administration has instructed the Pentagon to prep housing on its bases for as many as 20,000 more migrants the government intends to detain, while leaked Navy documents reveal plans for interning nearly 120,000 migrants, according to Time. Meanwhile, we have at least some 2,500 children who have been forcibly orphaned by the U.S. government and taken into custody even as the agencies responsible for their care apparently have neither the intent nor a system to reunite them with their parents.
But that we even are where we are—that we even extracted a begrudging but de facto admission of responsibility by Trump, who's executive order did indeed call his new "family unity" policy a "policy" (not a law)—is a marked improvement from this administration's last several weeks of blame-casting while they prosecuted an intentionally cruel regime.
The policy's creation, implementation, and eventual implosion was yet another stunning display of depravity, incompetency, and deceit, even by Trumpian standards. As early as March of 2017, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly admitted he was considering separating kids from their parents "in order to deter" the flow of migrants. Last month, Kelly again called it "a tough deterrent" while Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Monday he hoped people would "get the message" to come through an official port of entry (which are coincidentally understaffed by about 4,000 officers according to a recent report). Yet that same day DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen called the concept "offensive" when a reporter asked if the policy was being used as a deterrent.
Also, it was a law, y'all, that couldn't be reversed by executive order.
For days, Trump, Sessions and Nielsen insisted that family separation was required by law. Then White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told CNN that “nobody said” the law mandated family separation. [...]
And when reporters asked Trump on Friday why he would not reverse his two-month-old policy via executive order, Trump shot back, “You can’t do it through an executive order.”
When Trump finally surrendered Wednesday, he and his entire team were remorseless. After Team Trump had told America for months that the family separation policy must be enforced otherwise gangs would ravage the country, Vice President Mike Pence said that by reversing course, Trump was sending the message that having "a country of law and order" or a country of "compassion" was "a false choice." And after Nielsen had repeatedly insisted the situation could only be remedied by Congress, she thanked Trump for being "willing to stand up and fix" the problem that past presidents have glossed over "for decades"—because apparently he had the power to do that all along.
For his part, Trump claimed he "didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated," tragedies that he himself had inflicted on thousands of kids and parents while falsely insisting it was both "the Democrats' law" and only Congress could resolve the issue.
But the reaction of Sessions, who actually set the family separation policy in motion, was by far the most shameless and appalling. "We never really intended to do that," he had the gall to tell the Christian Broadcasting Network this week of ripping kids from their parents. Of course, Sessions seemed crystal clear about his intentions when he flew to the southern border to announce the initiative in May.
"If you don’t want your child separated, then don’t bring them across the border illegally. It’s not our fault that somebody does that,” he said. Golly gee, who could have ever guessed the separations were coming?
There has got to be a harsh comeuppance for someone who announces their intention to commit an act, subsequently insists they are required to commit that act by law, uses the Bible to defend committing that act, and then tells a Christian outlet that committing that act was never their intention in the first place.
In writing this weekly column during the first year of Trump's tenure, I mainly dedicated the space to confirming that Trump was exactly as delusional, self-serving, power hungry, and incompetent as many of us had believed during the campaign. Every week, my columns revolved around the lunacy of his actions, the utter ineptitude displayed in his policy roll outs, and his obvious and despicable racism, nativism, and misogyny. One year was enough. We were proven correct.
This year, I was prepared to go deeper, to stop simply regurgitating Trump's weekly rubbish and instead find specific topics to delve into that could illuminate, inform, and in some cases, provide hope and inspiration. What I wasn't prepared for was the exponential increase in Trump's madness and the daily, sometimes hourly, minute-by-minute stream of gaslighting that beats against us with the force of an unloosed fire hydrant. Everyday I sit down at my desk and think, here we go again, as I brace for another round of clean up on the wreckage left behind by Trump's diseased brain.
It was hard to imagine that it would be worse than last year, but it is. It is truly Trump unplugged, and it is inflicting daily trauma on the nation—or at least on anyone concerned enough to be paying attention to the degradation of our ideals. Our collective and personal sanity is like the collateral damage of Trump's deranged anti-intellectual warfare.
But the past several weeks of writing about the shameful and tragic implementation of this downright sinister policy, purposely and willfully executed by our government, has been the worst of it. And I was admittedly somewhat comforted to see other journalists such as Rachel Maddow demonstrate the same depth of emotion on air that I have been feeling at my computer and surely many of you have been experiencing at home. There's something worthwhile about not being alone in your trauma, in your grief. And if you have been carrying the weight of that trauma, I just want you to know that you are not alone and, at the very least, progress was made this week.
Remember, the only reason Trump blinked is because of public pressure—that's you guys. As I wrote in last week's column, Republican lawmakers were still giving Trump cover, still standing by the line that his brutal policy was a law that Democrats needed to change. Once enough Republican lawmakers were forced to quit parroting that GOP talking point and Trump realized he would actually have to take the blame for a policy of his own creation, he backed down—because Trump is nothing if not a first-rate coward.
A massive push from Democrats, Independents, and likely some Republicans is the sole reason that even a hint of reasonability and humanity prevailed this week. That's worth an exhale, at least for the moment.
The struggle continues, no doubt. But do whatever it is you need to do to stay healthy because our country needs you.