It can be incredibly frustrating to watch a desperate Donald Trump supporter cling to his every lie, misrepresentation, refusal to take personal responsibility for the failures of his administration, failure to own his moral and ethical lapses, and his The Hindenburg-sized braggadocio. It is even further a source of frustration that such a supporter feels the need to ignore all of that and tell Trump that he is still a “great guy.” We saw this happen at Trump’s “town hall” last night, when an audience member, Paulette Dale, told him that he had a “great smile” and the man with the weirdly orange complexion was “so handsome when you smile.” I’m glad I hadn’t eaten anything in the previous four hours.
Dale then announced that being the “daughter of immigrants to the United States who fled Eastern Europe due to religious persecution, the United States immigration policies are very personal for me.” She went on “Surveys show that most Americans, and the majority of Republicans, support the Dreamers program. So my question for you, Mr. President, is if you are elected to a second term, do you expect to pursue your previous efforts to cut the DACA program?”
Trump said “Yeah,” and that should have ended the conversation right there, because that is exactly what he has been doing. But Dale persisted. “Why or why not?” Trump then made the bizarre claim that DACA was “different” than Dreamers. What did he mean by that distinction? Hasn’t the term “Dreamers” always been used in conjunction with DACA? Was he insinuating that in his mind that one was less “worthy” of consideration than the other? Was one more “legal” or “meritorious” than the other? Were people from “shithole” countries in the DACA program, and those who were not the “Dreamers”?
Very likely, because Trump probably dislikes using the term “Dreamers” to describe people he feels demeans him to be around--unlike, say, people like Dale whose grandparents were from non-shithole countries like Russia and Poland. When “confronted” by such a “nice” and desperate-to-be-led white person not from Mexico, Central America or Haiti, Trump was in a “generous” mood:
That’s very good. Okay. So we are going to take care of DACA. We’re going to take care of Dreamer. It’s working right now. We’re negotiating different aspects of immigration and immigration law. We’ve built now, over 400 miles of border wall, southern border. Mexico is working very closely with us. We have the strongest border we’ve ever had. We want people to come into our country. They have to come in legally. But we are working very hard on the DACA program. And you will be, I think, very happy over the course of the next year…Because I feel the same way as you do about it.
Dale thanked Trump with a nauseatingly broad smile. Obviously she had not been paying attention to the news over the past several years in regard to the Trump administration’s position on DACA, let alone immigration in general, which he and his familiars like Stephen Miller have done everything possible to stop. Moderator Savannah Guthrie intervened, pointing out to Trump that “Under your administration, no new applicants are allowed. And in fact, the DACA recipients now have to renew every year as opposed to every two years. So in fact, the DACA program has been curtailed by your administration.”
Trump again lied, saying that it was the fault of the pandemic; in fact Chad Wolf’s July directive gave no reason for these actions. It was a plainly malicious response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the Department of Homeland Security had violated the Administrative Procedures Act as well as the equal protection clause of the Fifth Amendment, acting arbitrarily and capriciously in ending the DACA program. The directive was a deliberate attempt to make it more difficult to reapply for DACA extensions, by essentially doubling the previous fee for reapplication, and creating longer wait times for the USCIS to process applications--making it more difficult for DACA recipients to retain jobs and enroll in college.
This was all without doubt cooked-up by candidly racist people like Miller to deliberately cause harm to recipients, because the Trump administration couldn’t get its way lawfully. This is what Trump tweeted after the Supreme Court ruling:
These horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court are shotgun blasts into the face of people that are proud to call themselves Republicans or Conservatives. We need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else. Vote Trump 2020!
Does that sound like someone who is “compassionate” and wants to do the “right” thing in regard to DACA recipients? Only a deeply uninformed or blind person believes that. We can only take Trump at his word in his more “candid” moments, and he still couldn’t help reverting to racism even when a desperate supporter literally begged him to be “compassionate.” Trump bragged about his beautiful “wall,” and made the usual racist claims about “rapists” and “murderers” and how only people with “merit” should be allowed to come into this country. Below is a graph of essential jobs during the pandemic and the percentage of immigrants working in them; note that most of them would be considered to have no “merit” in Trump’s view:
When Guthrie asked him about the immigration “plan” he claimed to have back in July, she might as well have asked him about his “great” nonexistent health care plan too. He insisted that “everyone” is “very impressed” about what he has done about immigration--meaning, of course, everyone in his “base.” Personally, I would like to see Trump’s immigration “plan” before the election, because “everyone” who isn’t one of his racist supporters--even a blind supporter like Paulette Dale--might be “cured” of their blindness.
Let’s recap what Trump has said in the past about DACA:
In a shockingly despicable, racist and lie-infested speech in Phoenix in August 2016, Trump vowed to terminate both DACA and DAPA as “President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties, in which he defied federal law and the constitution to give amnesty to approximately 5 million illegal immigrants.”
By 2017, Trump seemed to have a “change” of heart. He told ABC News that DACA recipients were “here illegally (but) they shouldn’t be very worried. I do have a big heart. We’re going to take care of everybody. We’re going to have a very strong border. We’re gonna have a very solid border. Where you have great people that are here that have done a good job, they should be far less worried. We’ll be coming out with policy on that over the next period of four weeks.”
That “policy” was stilling waiting to come out when Trump told TIME magazine that “We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud. They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Sound’s “great,” but what was Trump “really” thinking, since he was saying two different things to two different audiences. We soon found out. The bipartisan DACA deal by Senators Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin that Trump seemed so “enthused” about one day, became the next day a “shithole” deal he wanted no part of; apparently he had been “reminded” by John Kelly and Miller that his “base” would be very, very unhappy about it. Trump would even oppose a DACA deal proposed by Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer in exchange for $20 billion for his “wall.”
Shortly thereafter came the announcement by rabid anti-Hispanic Attorney General Jeff Sessions: "The program known as DACA that was effectuated under the Obama administration is being rescinded.” Trump later added "There can be no path to principled immigration reform if the executive branch is able to rewrite or nullify federal laws at will.”
Trump’s attitude toward DACA hasn’t changed since then. The truth is that he and his familiars, like Miller, Wolf and new ICE chief Tom Pham all dream of “deporting” every Hispanic in this country that they can get their hands on by any means necessary, and that couldn’t happen soon enough for Trump’s most radical base. And yet we continue to see foolish people like Paulette Dale who are too blinded by their “awe” of Trump to recognize the truth about him.
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