An amazing thing happened this week. The United States government continued a policy that forces the separation of parents and children, along with the shipment of children—including newborn infants, to for-profit centers around the country. But that’s not the amazing thing.
BY midweek, the national disgust had generated such political pressure that Donald Trump’s team hastily created a executive order that Trump could sign to “end” the separation policy, even though Trump had spent the previous week insisting that there was no such policy, and if there was, he was powerless to stop it. That’s also not the amazing thing.
After Trump’s ceremonial scrawl, media reports and newspapers across the country were headlined by praise for how Trump had “acted quickly” to “solve” a problem that had not existed before Trump instituted the policy of zero tolerance in April. These outlets lauded Trump for addressing an issue that was entirely of his own creation. That’s … a way too typical thing.
Nope, here’s the amazing thing—the nation did not move on. Scott Pruitt produced at least three fresh scandals, including one that permanently made “fancy pants” part of his official title. And the nation did not move on. Robert Mueller added four more prosecutors to his investigation, while Michael Cohen continued to signal his availability to the highest bidder. No moving on. Trade wars bubbled, Republicans beat up on the National Science Foundation, and ABC decided to see if they can do Rosanne without Rosanne.
And the nation did not move on.
Instead, protesters gathered around government offices and blocked buses leaving ICE facilities. Airlines declared they would not participate in taking children thousands of miles from their families. And many, many people seemed to understand that what Donald Trump had signed was pointless; a media event that did nothing but enshrine the idea that Trump is answerable to no one on any subject. After more than a year in which it seemed that scandal and disaster followed a kind of law of Trumpian gravity, in which they accelerated second by second, the nation seems to have finally planted an ax, put down its feet. Declare that there is, after all, a bottom. And Trump has found it.
For the first time since Trump took office, most of the columns this week … are about the same thing that was at the core of the columns last week. Ordinarily, the idea that people were continuing to rail against a problem because it had not been solved would be disappointing. But it’s not. It’s amazing. Seeing that it is possible to return to the same story day after day, even when Trump is running his distract-o-matic at maximum, is not just the first step toward real change, but definitely something that should be celebrated—right after we celebrate the end of Trump’s disastrous zero tolerance policy.
Immigration
Dana Milbank on a coat, cruelty, and Donald Trump.
The administration’s cruelty is particularly prominent lately, because of photos of the anguish of the migrant children — and President Trump’s accompanying allegation of “phony stories of sadness” and his warning that immigrants, like insects, would “infest” the country. But the current episode, though highly visible, is hardly one of a kind. By now, the administration has amassed an extensive catalogue of cruelty.
Milbank recounts the week’s catalog of Trump attacks, from crushing the latest attempt to protect Dreamers, to stealing funds from Medicaid patients, to taking a fresh swipe at John McCain. There’s really no mystery why Trump behaves the way he does: Trump has explained it fully. He regards any display of empathy as not just “weak” but “pathetically weak.” Cruelty, cruelty that condemns those in most dire extremes and denies even a crumb to those on the brink … That’s what constitutes “Strength” for Trump.
Though of course it’s not only cruelty that Trump regards as strength. Cowardice will also do, as when Trump explains that only a “strong” policy can prevent the possibility of crime. Trump is very, very willing to ‘give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety ‘ and he’ll call it being “very strong.”
Trump previously reduced the number of refugees from 110,000 to 45,000 per year — the lowest in almost 40 years; and even fewer are actually being admitted, forcing tens of thousands to remain in refugee camps and return to face persecution or violence in the countries they fled. This is after Trump’s travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries, which resulted in families separated and students and doctors denied entry.
There is a policy that would reduce the suffering now being endured by both immigrant families and Americans alike. It’s called electing a lot of Democrats and impeaching that bastard Trump.
Kathleen Parker on the nation’s audible ink blot.
Most have seen the photo of a 2-year-old child sobbing as her mother is being patted down by a Border Patrol agent. This image, which would touch anyone’s heart, became an instant viral infestation, to borrow the president’s term for the migrant flow, and it quickly shifted the border debate from one of urgency to near hysteria. Let’s just say coifs are aflame.
For Democrats, the quintessential photo provided the ultimate bunker buster for the midterm battles ahead. For Republicans, it was merely further evidence of the Fake News empire striking yet again. The profanely unwise Ann Coulter even suggested that such children were actors trained by liberals.
Parker seems willing to admit what few Republicans will countenance — immigration law does not demand heartlessness. And an even bigger admission: Immigrants are human beings, driving by motivations that have forced them to endure a horrible journey that ends with a equally desperate gamble.
Yes, of course, the migrating parents are responsible for bringing their young children to the border without documentation, but theirs is a sin born mostly of desperation; ours is a sin of volition, lacking even ordinary logic or a philosophy of compassion, both of which are today in scarcer supply with the departure of one Dr. Krauthammer.
Yeah … there’s one part of that last sentence that … I’ll just let pass.
Colbert King on the lie behind Trump’s executive order.
As The Post’s “Fact Checker” column noted this week, until Wednesday, when Trump signed an executive order ending the separation of migrant families at the Mexican border, his “administration was insisting that it didn’t have a policy of separating families (false), that several laws and court rulings were forcing these separations (false), that Democrats were to blame (false), that only Congress could stop family separations (false) and that an executive order wouldn’t get the job done.”
No other words for it: Trump is a baldfaced liar.
And of course, there’s another big lie in all this—that executive order. King moves on to talking about other famous instances of Trump lying to reporters and a public who certainly should know better, but his “order ending the separation of migrant families” does no such thing. Instead it awards an unlimited power to separate and nails down Trump’s beliefs that his power is unlimited and indisputable.
“Why does he lie?” is a question many have tackled. I don’t know the answer. To accumulate and hold his grip on power? To bamboozle his supporters? To wiggle out of tight spots? The impact, nonetheless, is destructive. James P. Pfiffner, a public policy professor at George Mason University, wrote in a Brookings Institution blogthat “Trump’s refusal to admit the truth of widely accepted facts corrodes political discourse and is consistent with the practice of many authoritarian leaders.”
Matthew Kolken on the news that military bases are preparing to house 20,000 children.
According to a report by the Daily Beast, the US federal government has engaged the services of the defense industry to facilitate its strategy of tearing migrant children from the arms of their mothers as a deterrent to improper entry to country. Defense contractors’ intended role in this madness? Childcare providers.
I took the opportunity to review the website of one such contractor, Virginia-based MVM, Inc. The website includes an impressive list of services and expertise – not including childcare. As an immigration lawyer who frequently represents unaccompanied minors in immigration court, and as a father of two, I find it unconscionable that an industry that principally serves the needs of the military and federal law enforcement agencies would be charged with overseeing the health and wellbeing of children.
Dirty diapers, dirty bombs … there’s probably a joke in there somewhere that a Trump supporter would appreciate. But while we’re looking for it, keep in mind that Betsy Devos’ family has already started bringing children into one of their facilities, thousands of miles from the border where those children were taken.
“Every part of separation is deliberately designed to make a buck,” Bridget Cambria, an immigration lawyer who works with detained children, told me. And to protect that business, the government and private contractors make it as difficult as possible for those affected to seek legal recourse.
This is why people like DeVos love seizing newborns—they never threaten to sue, and don’t even know how to get a complaint up the legal chain. Stupid babies.
Hadley Freeman on why we should not be shocked by Trump’s policy.
The stories now coming out of the United States are so devastating they can only be described as a national moral stain: five-year-olds being led away by officers who say they are giving them a bath, only for their parents to then be told they won’t be seeing them again; mothers being deported and forced to leave children behind with no way of contacting them; hundreds of terrified children locked within chain-link fence walls, aka cages, while an official jokingly describes their cries as “an orchestra”.
President Trump’s team is currently reacting to these stories by alternately denying their veracity and defending their effectiveness, and in the case of Kirstjen Nielsen, US secretary of homeland security, doing both simultaneously. The rest of us want to throw up on our shoes and cry. But as horrific as these stories are, they are only happening because casual racism against immigrants has long been part of America’s identity.
Racism is at the core of this thing. And if you forget that for a moment, just take a look at any right-wing news source, where images showing that these immigrants are often brown, brown, is used as all the justification that’s needed to to declare them criminals. Freeman also has a little reminder for US history buffs.
The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 was written to prevent the country being polluted by “abnormally twisted” Jews, who were deemed “filthy, un-American and dangerous in their habits”. It passed overwhelmingly, but according to those who wrote it, it did not go far enough. So in 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act was proposed, which effectively banned all Asians from entering the country. It was intended, as congressman Albert Johnson put it, to “keep American stock up to the highest standard – that is, people who were born here”. It too passed in the House and the Senate without a glitch.
What’s happening now may be unimaginable, but it’s certainly not un-American.
Leonard Pitts on the shocking discovery that immigrants come in child sizes.
Illegals” have faces.
This is what Republicans are learning to their chagrin amid mounting international outrage over the new policy of separating immigrant children from their families at our southern border. For years, the party has pretended otherwise. It has denied undocumented immigrants their personhood, casting them instead as an abstract threat — rape! gangs! murder! — against anyone who makes the mistake of compassion.
Now reality is blasting through that xenophobic fiction like a comet through a sandcastle.
But of course, immigrant faces include Latino faces. MS-13! And Muslim faces. ISIS! For Republicans the idea that many immigrants reached America in an effort to evade those groups isn’t worth considering. After all, it’s not like MS-13 could possibly represent a threat big enough to make anyone run. Not when Republicans are daily condemning immigrants to return to the towns where organized crime reigns.
But the president digs in. “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” said the child-abuser-in-chief Monday.
In defending this evil, he is, of course, following longtime GOP orthodoxy. Back in 2006, President George W. Bush proposed an imperfect but pragmatic immigration reform that would have hardened the border, offered a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here and created a guest-worker program and a merit-based system for future immigrants.
Fortunately, America seems to have dug in its heels, and is for once giving an issue lasting, well-informed push-back.
Richard Wolffe and the Trump card of cruelty.
Was it the “tender age” inmates, the rare sight of all the Senate’s Republicans growing a spine, or the even rarer sight of intervention from every one of the nation’s first ladies?
We’ll never know the truth behind Donald Trump’s humiliating reversal of his own brutal policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border.
Again, while the brief ceremony in which Trump signed an executive order on family separation had the nice effect of getting Trump officials to admit it was actually happening, it did nothing to either end zero tolerance or, beyond a few days, protect children from being taken away.
So spare us the pretense – and the lazy reporting – about Trump’s newfound moral compass. When Anthony “The Mooch” Scaramucci is testifying about your compassion, you need to find better character witnesses. You also should tell him to stop blaming other White House officials for his own disastrous policies.
Special Apperance
And now, for something you’ve not seen on this page since I started doing this page. I’m violating my own longest-standing ban on a pundit for just one special message.
George Will on the fall elections.
In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.
It’s kind of hard to tell from the midst of Will’s ludicrous overwriting, but he’s saying: Vote Democrat this fall. They’re deplorable, but also not Trump.
Okay. Ban restored.
