Trump supporters seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that Trump is not “one of them,” paying no taxes and having $287 million of debt “forgiven” because lenders knew he will never agree to pay any of it back. Not only did he not pay the debts in question, but he listed it as “lost income” to lighten his tax “burden” even more. Trump blamed city officials in Chicago for the failure of another one of his “Trump” branded towers, when the real blame lies with his own business incompetence.
Trump has perfected not that the “art of the deal,” but the “art of the steal,” and that money “forgiven”--not just in his Chicago tower, but in many other instances where he sued for bankruptcy--was money he stole from the bank accounts of working people like you and me. Trump continues to have the audacity to ignore John Fogerty’s “cease and desist” demand from playing his song “Fortunate Son,” which describes him to a “T”:
Some folks are born silver spoon in hand
Lord, don’t they help themselves
But when the taxman comes to the door
Lord, the house lookin’ like a rummage sale
Trump supporters claim that Trump is simply being “smart.” Oh yeah? Well he certainly read them right; as the saying goes, there is a sucker born every minute. We paid for his business misdeeds, and now we are paying for his policy misdeeds. But some are paying more, much more, than others. Take for instance asylum seekers to this country, the ones who are trying to obey the law for entry into this country. This is how Trump described them last year at a conference sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition:
You pick out a name. Do you think they're putting their finest? Do you think they're putting their great people there? No and then people come in and you see what happens with the crime and murders, 4,000 murders last year, four thousand. How stupid can we be to put up with this? How stupid can we be? And the asylum program is a scam, some of the roughest people you've ever seen, people that looked like they should be fighting for the UFC.
They read a little page given by lawyers that are all over the place, you know, my lawyers, they tell them what to say. You look at this guy, you say, "Wow, that's a tough cookie." I am very fearful for my life. I am very worried that I will be accosted if I was sent back home. No, no he'll do the accosting.
Asylum. Oh, give him asylum, he's afraid, he's afraid. We don't love the fact that he's got tattoos on his face, that's not a good sign. We don't love the fact that he's carrying the flag of Honduras or Guatemala or El Salvador only to say he's petrified to be in his country. To confront this border crisis, I declared a national emergency.
Many in the audience laughed at these remarks. Shouldn’t Jewish people be just a little “cautious” about misrepresenting and demonizing people who are trying to escape violence in their countries--particularly those who have been victimized because of gangs that first “incubated” in the U.S. and then “deported” to ravage Central America, or those trying to escape the violence because of this country’s “addiction” to illegal drugs? After all, the neo-Nazi types that Trump welcomes and calls “fine people” don’t exactly have a “place” for Jews in their vision of the world.
The truth is that the vast majority of migrants--let alone asylum seekers--are families, women and children. In his most reason show, John Oliver pointed out that on virtually every policy issue, the Trump administration has displayed a remarkable level of disorganization, confusion and failure, save for one: immigration. “The Trump administration’s attack on asylum has been focused, dedicated and deeply resourceful…In this one area, they have been truly disciplined about being truly evil.”
Trump has deployed his army of ICE thugs against the people most vulnerable to the predation of racists in this country, while lying about who most of these people are. Those 680 people rounded up in Mississippi doing unhealthy and sometimes dangerous work were not the “roughest people you’ve every seen”--only the work they were doing was. And unlike Trump, they were doing an honest day’s labor and paying taxes.
Today it is almost impossible to apply for asylum if you have a Spanish name. In a clip Oliver showed of a woman providing guidance for prospective asylum seekers, she advised them that extortion and physical threats from gangs and drug cartels are not acceptable reasons to request asylum, despite the fact that most of the criminal gangs in Central America were first incubated in the U.S. and then “deported.” People whose lives have been threatened by criminal or political entities cannot request asylum, even if family members have already been killed. One asylum seeker sarcastically inquired if the only way to “prove” that their lives are in danger is if they showed up dead, and was told with all seriousness “yes.” Oliver cynically noted that it would be a “big help” if you did apply for asylum after you were murdered because of your religion.
The “remain in Mexico” policy--outrageously called the “Migrant Protection Protocols--was shown to do exactly the opposite. Drug cartels keeping the U.S. market supplied with illegal drugs and responsible for the excesses of the murder rate in Mexico, are also taking advantage of the MPP by kidnapping asylum seekers off the street and holding them for ransom. One cartel member described the system thus: “We just pull people off the street and put them in a safe house. We reach their families in the U.S. to ask for the money…all the way from $10,000 to $20,000 American dollars. We know they can afford it. That’s why we do what we do.” What if they don’t pay? “Well, they just end up where they end up”--meaning “dead.” And that of course, doesn’t mean that the kidnapped asylum seeker can expect to be granted asylum at all; upon payment of a ransom, they are given a “code word” just in case they are kidnapped again.
Oliver pointed out that despite claims by Chad Wolf and others, the problem with the asylum system is that it simply isn’t working and migrants know that, more so now under the Trump administration than ever before, and deliberately so to prevent almost all from having their applications approved--if they are even lucky enough to get a hearing. Title 42, which deals with public health, has been used to deny all asylum request since March, and to expel 200,000 asylum seekers already in the country, with no due process.
Trump administration officials continue to tell the blackest of lies in claiming that Title 42 has nothing to do with immigration, when it clearly is being used as an anti-immigration tool. Oliver pointed out that Jewish Nazi (my term) Stephen Miller had been attempting to use Title 42 to expel asylum seekers long before anyone had even heard of COVID-19. Even the CDC has admitted that expelling asylum seekers would not slow down the spread of the virus--and it hasn’t slowed down the spread of the Trump administration’s evil, deeply ironic since Trump continues to claim that the pandemic is “fake news.”
What has been happening, of course, is packing asylum seekers already here into detention centers with other migrants; some of the latter are being detained for serious crimes or charges, but most, despite the claims of Wolf and Tony Pham, are charged with nothing more than traffic citations or simply for being undocumented. ICE repeatedly ignored court orders to release or transfer non-criminal migrants in detention centers where COVID-19 was raging because of the lack of social distancing and the failure to provide adequate PPE. This week ICE director Pham--who came to the U.S. as a child refugee from Vietnam--joined a chorus of administration voices politicizing and sounding out the “alarm” about having to release “criminals” from a California detention center where nearly everyone is infected by the virus. Below is a photo of Pham in an ICE facility, and how seriously he takes the virus:
The bottom line is that the Trump administration’s policy on asylum seekers is simply, baldly, racist and evil. Oliver illustrated this evil by telling the story of Berta, a 60ish Honduran woman whose 12-year-old granddaughter was being demanded as a child-bride by a local gang, which threatened to burn Berta to death unless she complied. She refused and escaped to the U.S. border with her granddaughter, where she applied for asylum. She was separated from the child and held in detention for 17 months before being told she would be deported back to Honduras.
But then again, why should we expect even the tiniest fraction of empathy or humanity from the likes of Trump, let alone from his supporters who believe this is all a laughing matter, because the only place where it “touches” them is in the most evil, vile, darkest place in their souls.
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