In news that’s surely a relief to Republicans in the House and Senate, Donald Trump has informed them they can all stop pretending to address the immigration issue. In a series of morning tweets, Trump declared that “Republicans should stop wasting their time on Immigration” until the fall elections, because Democrats will only defeat any bills they put forward in the Senate. Then Trump went on to blame Democrats for the failure of the harsh Goodlatte immigration bill, which could not even gain enough Republican votes to make it out of the GOP-dominated House.
Trump spent more of his time hammering his false accusations about Democrats and crime, and predicting a “Red Wave”—which makes it seem that Donald Trump doesn’t quite get how this “metaphor” thing works. He might have at least gone with “red tide,” which is a thing, a suffocating, odorous mass of scum thing … but still a thing.
But as Trump’s PJ-clad executive time spreads out to capture more and more of his day, he generated extensive tweets: promoting an upcoming 90-minute hate in South Carolina, promoting a series of GOP candidates based on how well they pass the Toady for Trump exam, and pausing for an insta-book promotion for yet another Fox “expert.” This marks an even dozen book promotion tweets from Trump in just the last two months. It’s only a matter of time before he begins simply repeating the commercials on Fox & Friends word for word.
Notably missing from Trump’s morning sampler—any mention of family separation. Because that problem has already been “solved.”
In many ways, Donald Trump is a model of efficiency. While past White House residents have wasted time trying to deal with complex and difficult issues in the real world, Trump simply inflates existing problems, then pretends that they’ve been dealt with. Sometimes this requires Trump to engage in the B-reel version of Jedi Mind Tricks—such as his repeated and ridiculous insistence that Barack Obama was on the brink of war with North Korea—more often it counts on nothing more than the tendency of news media to repeat his words with no greater warning label than “Trump said...”
And what happened this week with family separations was a perfect illustration. Trump created a zero tolerance policy that caused the number of family separations to soar. Then, in response to a national outrage, Trump made a hand-wave toward a symptom, while vocally declaring that he was leaving the cause intact. And the media dutifully reported “problem solved!” in bold type.
It is nice that Donald Trump is letting Congress know they can go back to pretending to do other things. In ordinary times, congressmen do so love it when 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue tells them their business. But the number of Republicans who can be expected to gainsay Trump can be counted on no hands.