The number of immigrants caught crossing the southern border was the lowest in 2017 that it had been since 1971, but Donald Trump thinks there’s an emergency that requires military intervention. After days of Fox-fueled Twitter ranting about immigrants, Trump suddenly announced on Tuesday that “We are preparing for the military to secure our border between Mexico and the United States.” If you heard that and had questions, you weren’t the only one:
After the president’s remarks, White House aides struggled for hours to decipher his intentions.
Late in the day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Trump had met with Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, and members of the national security team to discuss his administration’s strategy for dealing with “the growing influx of illegal immigration, drugs and violent gang members from Central America,” a problem on which she said the president had initially been briefed last week.
That strategy, she said, included mobilizing the National Guard — though Ms. Sanders did not say how many troops would be sent or when — and pressing Congress to close what she called “loopholes” in immigration laws.
Pause with this for a moment: the president of the United States announced plans to deploy the military within the United States and his aides weren’t sure what he meant. The conclusion, outside the White House at least, is that this is more about Trump’s wounded fee-fees than anything else:
The announcements on Monday and Tuesday appeared to be more about political messaging than practical action. Stung by a backlash from his conservative supporters over his embrace of a trillion-dollar-plus spending measure that did not fund his promised border wall, and lacking a legislative initiative to champion with the approach of midterm congressional elections this fall, Mr. Trump has reverted to the aggressive anti-immigration messaging that powered his presidential campaign and has defined his first year in office.
Immigration advocates denounced Mr. Trump’s announcement as a political ploy.
“He cannot get funding for his wall, so instead he irresponsibly misuses our military to save face,” Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy at the Center for Migration Studies of New York.
That’s got Trump written all over it. But it doesn’t mean he’s not putting us on a dangerous path.