On Wednesday, Donald Trump signed an executive order to do what he, and every Trump surrogate who appeared on every form of media, spent the previous week insisting that he absolutely could not do—stop separating kids from their parents at the border. But after claiming that breaking up families was ordained of God, beating his chest over the need to enforce The Law, making careful distinctions between his child-stealing and that carried out by the Nazis, and mostly just blaming everything on the Democrats … Trump found that he could change the policy with a stroke of a pen after all.
Even that was all for the cameras. The policy was instituted without an executive order, and could have been ended the same way. The whole signing ceremony, complete with another round of how Democrats want “open borders” because they love criminals, was nothing but a cartoon Band-Aid slapped over a suppurating wound. A show for the point of having a show.
But just because Trump signing that executive order was a defeat for Trump—and it was a defeat for Trump—doesn’t make it a victory for immigrant families. Trump still maintains his zero-tolerance policy, and the document decorated with his latest magic-marker contains not even a hint of a limit on executive power. Not even when that power is being used to … separate parents from their kids. The order leaves open the idea that families can still be separated over “concerns,” and unlike the bill that was signed by every Democratic senator, those concerns don’t have to rise to the level of actions that would, in other legal circumstances, lead to the severance of parental rights. In truth, Trump’s executive order declares and preserves his authority to separate families for any reason at all. Or to detain them as a group. What it doesn’t offer is any limit on his power, or hint of judicial or congressional review.
How does Trump’s executive order address requirements that children be held in detention for only twenty days? It doesn’t. Maybe Trump intends to challenge that notion in court. Maybe he means to keep families together for twenty days, and then separate them. Equally likely, Trump intends to simply ignore the rulings of the court. He’ll give a quick wave to the portrait of Andrew Jackson on his wall, and say that the courts have made their decision, now let them enforce it. He’s been aching for that moment.
That executive order also contains no mention of the thousands of families who have already been separated by Trump’s policies over the last weeks. Not a word about the children and infants, some of them still housed in former Walmarts near the border—some of them loaded onto planes and shipped thousands of miles away—or the parents who don’t even know what state their kids are in. In signing his pointless order, Trump gave not an inch of his claimed authority, admitted not a single mistake and surrendered not a single one of his hostages.
Trump’s attempt to extort the nation into giving him the billions he wants to build the world’s largest monument to xenophobia was blatant, and not by accident. Even as he was scrawling his mark across yet another ludicrous statement, Trump ranted about the need for “strength.”
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The primary message he wanted to relay was that signing the order in no way represented any step back from “zero tolerance”—a policy that is nothing short of giving brown people a minimum sentence of two years for the legal equivalent of jaywalking. And in giving that message Trump lamented that it was important to be “strong.” He called people who wanted to allow immigrants waiting for asylum hearings to be free not just “weak” but “really, really pathetically weak.” Even though that’s both the law, and the policy of every past White House.
It was a moment that highlighted the core issue with Trump. It’s not his preening overconfidence wrapped around a deep well of ignorance that makes Trump such a horror. The biggest problem—the central problem—with Donald Trump, is that he cannot distinguish strength from cruelty. He believes that causing harm is the “strong” thing to do, even when it’s easy. He believes that showing compassion or working for justice is “weak,” even if it’s hard.
And of course, Donald Trump deeply, deeply believes in both racism and in judging people by the content of their wallets. That’s why it’s perfectly okay to condemn families at the border for the infraction of trying to save their children, but Scott Pruitt’s more than a dozen violations of rules and laws are casually dismissed. It’s why a Republican toady with the childish nickname of “Scooter” gets a pardon, but children who would better fit the name are thrown away where they can’t be found.
Donald Trump signed a piece of paper because the pressure grew great enough that those around him felt he had to make a gesture. So he gestured. And gave a middle finger to America.