Category: Immigration

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION RECORD IS A CONSISTENT, UTTER FAILURE

Donald Trump has tackled his pet issue of immigration with all of the bluster – but none of the effectiveness – of the Big Bad Wolf.  He has huffed and puffed his way through dozens of lame attempts to keep brown and black people from entering the country.  Unlike the nursery rhyme villain who succeeded in demolishing two-thirds of the Three Little Pigs’ real estate, the Donald’s bloviation has accomplished absolutely nothing. On the contrary, he has managed to make a broken immigration system far worse than it was. 

Strategic thinking, of course, has never been in this president’s wheelhouse.  He’s a tactics-only man, the kind of guy who tosses fecal matter against the wall with no plan to make it stick.  So far, none of it has. As a matter of fact, there is no wall for it to stick to. Mexico won’t pay for it and neither will Congress. All of his tactics have imploded: a government shutdown, family separations, troops at the border, threats of sealing the border, firing Homeland Security officials for not being tough, asking immigration agents to ignore the law by refusing to let migrants into the country.  Now he wants to charge asylum applicants exorbitant fees and eliminate bail for those accused of entering the country illegally. 

Meanwhile, government officials processed more than 103,000 migrants last month, the highest level in more than 12 years.  Not since the Vietnam War, has an administration demonstrated such utter ineptness at problem solving.  Not only have Trump’s mindless and manic remedies failed miserably, they have exacerbated the very crisis that has defined his presidency.

There is nothing simple about America’s long-broken immigration system, but there is one basic truth that has permeated this issue for decades:  deterrence is no magic wand when it comes to keeping migrants out of the country.  Threats of indefinite imprisonment didn’t hold the Cuban or Haitian boat people back in the Carter and Reagan years.  Fences and intense border patrol policing during the Clinton and Bush years simply rerouted migrants through a deadly Arizona desert. The Obama administration’s Central American advertising campaign warning against family migration had no impact.  

Then along comes Trump and his innate inability to comprehend complexities.  His immigration policy consists of insults and an endless barrage of cruelty designed to keep the “animals” and “bad hombres” from entering the country.  He justified his gambit of pulling migrant children out of the arms of their parents as a deterrence mechanism. Never mind the moral ends-means conundrum.  The government’s own figures showed the caging of children separated from their parents had zero impact on the flow of migrants.  

It was almost as if Trump had no knowledge of the great Sonoran Desert diversion of the 1990s. And, of course, he probably didn’t.  Not many people did until New York’s public radio station, WNYC, produced an astounding Radiolab series called Border Trilogy.The documentary told the story of how government immigration officials used a combination of massive border patrolling and fencing to reduce illegal crossing through a swath of Texas.  The strategy was to reroute migrants through Arizona’s deadly Sonoran Desert, a treacherous path certain to produce serious injuries and death.  The thinking was that word of such adverse consequences would serve as a deterrent to entering the country.  Turns out that they had only part of the theory right. Desert deaths went from four or five a year to hundreds as soon as the plan was put into place.  But the migrants were not deterred.  The death toll went as high as 10,000, and may be even higher because many remains, picked over by vultures and other creatures, were never found.   If the threat of death doesn’t deter migrants in search of a better life, what would?

Deterrence theory is predicated on a behavior model foreign to the immigration context. It assumes that the decider is relatively rational and capable of applying a linear cost-benefit analysis to a contemplated action. Most migrants entering the country are fleeing Central America’s northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. It’s an area where weak, corrupt and autocratic governance has yielded violent gangs, drug trafficking and rampant human rights abuses. 

One 15-year-old Honduran boy told Stanford University researchers nothing would stop him from trying to make his way to America. “Here we live in fear. . .I’ve thought of it a lot. I will go.” Why?  His sister was killed by gang members.  Five teenagers were gunned down outside of a youth center he regularly went to, and a grocer in his neighborhood had just been shot.  When that’s the only life you know, a cage or tent in El Paso is hardly a deterrent. It may not be what Janis Joplin had in mind, but it certainly fits: “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”

In order to understand that, however, policy makers have to be able to get out of their own heads and see the world through the eyes of the Honduran boy.  And that is something our empathy-deficient president is unable to do. So he just keeps flinging crap at the wall. For example, take the punitive action of cutting off foreign aid to the northern triangle countries. It may make Trump feel tough, but the result will certainly be a further deterioration in those countries, sending even more migrants to our borders. Similarly, the president’s overzealous approach to arresting asylum seekers, gives him the aura of the powerful new sheriff in town. Yet, the reality is that the country now has a backlog of 850,000 immigration cases, up by more than 200,000 since Trump took office. With fewer than 450 immigration judges, Central American families arriving now know they will have years to spend in this country until their case comes up, the very outcome Trump wants to avoid.

The ultimate solution to this crisis will come from neither all-cap tweets nor scorched earth, stick-it-to-them tactics.  There are multiple pieces to this puzzle and they need to be addressed in a comprehensive immigration-reform legislative package.  Sadly, even before the 2016 election, Congress was unable to rise to the occasion. Such an outcome now is about as likely as Trump replacing William Barr with Robert Mueller as attorney general.  Our only hope is that at least some of those Trump voters who believed their guy would singlehandedly resolve this immigration mess by building a big, beautiful, Mexico-paid-for wall has not only failed to deliver the goods, he’s made matters much worse. 

BEWARE OF UNWISE MEN BEARING SIMPLISTIC IDEAS

A long time ago, in what now seems like a galaxy far, far away, conservatives possessed an intellectual rigor that drove their vision of laissez-faire government, individual liberty and a free market economy. Although not my cup of tea, this political philosophy reflected an honest, rational and structured approach to governance.   That’s all gone now, replaced by the impulses of angry, feeble thinkers whose approach to leadership is vastly inferior to that of a gaggle of drunken sailors.  

Surely conservative giants like Barry Goldwater, William Buckley and Milton Friedman are spinning in their graves – to the right of course – as their movement devolves into a frantic rush toward foolish, simplistic and jingoistic responses to complicated problems. Whether it’s Brexit in Europe or Trump’s wall at the Mexican border, we are living in an age of political thoughtlessness.  It’s as if that crazy uncle who delights in listing the inane things he’d do if only he were king, was suddenly wearing a crown.  

Yes, conventional conservatives like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, rank high on the nuisance scale with their trickle-down shell games and burning desire to raid Social Security.  But at least they had the cognitive wherewithal to come up with specific, detailed plans that would further their objectives, as onerous as they be to many of us.  This new breed of right wing populism seems to be propelled by non-ideas.  Instead of concrete plans, we get metaphoric images that whip up the base but offer not the slightest hint of an actual solution.

Donald Trump was jubilant this week over a federal judge’s decision striking down the entire Affordable Care Act, also known – particularly  by Trump rally fans – as  Obamacare.  If the ruling survives appellate review, the president insisted there will be “great healthcare results for Americans!”  The Donald and his disciples have been railing, ranting and raging over Obamacare since the Republican primaries nearly three years ago.  Not once – during the primaries, the general election campaign or his first two years as president – has Trump ever offered the slightest hint of what he thinks “great healthcare” would consist of.  He has never had anything resembling a constructive thought about healthcare. It was all about capturing the adulation of the Obama-haters, with no regard to what happens to people who lose their insurance.  To Trump and his minions, “Abolish Obamacare” was as void of meaning as “Lock Her Up”. The juices of anger flowed, but there wasn’t a single policy thought to be had.

This is the same kind of thought-deprived leadership that has thrown the United Kingdom into a perpetual state of crisis. Just as America-first Trumpism was gaining steam in 2016, conservative populism roared through the UK, emotionally propelled by the simplistic notion that life could be made great again with a one-word plan: LEAVE.  By a 52 percent margin, the Brits voted in a national referendum to secede from the European Union.  Zero thought was given to the practical policy implications of secession, and Parliament, after two painful years of trying to come up with a divorce decree, is nowhere close to an agreement.  That means the separation may well occur in March without a single plan on how to handle such details as trade, taxes, financial payments and immigration policy. The Bank of England has warned of a “deep and damaging recession with worse consequences for the UK economy than the 2008 financial crisis.”  LEAVE made for a powerful chant, but it was completely content-free, void of any details about how the breakup would affect people’s lives.

Back home, Trump has threatened to end the week with a partial government shutdown over another of his one-word campaigns. Like a toddler pleading for a favorite toy, the president has been yammering for his WALL, his “big, beautiful” wall, a magical wall that will restore America’s greatness by keeping people with brown skin out of the country.  

There are few public policy issues more complex and involved than immigration, which is one reason Congress has been unable to tackle the issue in a satisfactory manner for more than 30 years.  And then along comes Trump and his one-word fix.  “Build the WALL”, is at or near the top of the charts for his campaign rally chants. As if architecture could solve one of the world’s thorniest problems.  

As of last year, nearly 60 million people have been forced by violence and conflict to flee their homes. More than half of all refugees are under 18.  According to the United Nations, if all those asylum-seekers and refugees were a country, it would be the twenty-first most populous nation in the world. In the U.N.’s view this crisis is the worst it has been since World War II and will steadily become worse as violent conflicts grow and climate change wreaks havoc. Yet, the alleged leader of the free world directs none of the vast resources at his disposal to find meaningful responses to these problems. Instead, he yaps incessantly about his wall as the magical cure for a broken immigration system.  And on climate change, he offers a rake.

The only upside to the right’s cataclysmic populism, is that it is difficult to envision a scenario where it has staying power. By definition, simplistic solutions to complicated problems fail. The essence of their brief life span lies in the visceral illusion of workability.  Cracks are already bringing to show. Polls track a steady approval increase for the elements of the Affordable Care Act, even among those who disliked Obama.  They don’t want to lose their insurance.  Faced with potentially severe consequences of leaving the E.U., many Brexit supporters have expressed buyers’ remorse. That’s not to say there won’t be serious fallout from this politics of mindlessness. It is merely a reminder of the governing principle that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

A BOY ON AN INNER TUBE BEFORE “ZERO TOLERANCE”

If you want to beat the political ramifications of inflicting major trauma on young children, it’s better to have thousands of victims rather than just one. That’s the lesson we’ve learned from the Trump administration’s toxic “zero tolerance” campaign. This is the border war that left toddlers bruised, battered and neglected, and forced infants, torn from their parents’ arms, to represent themselves in front of immigration judges.

Six weeks ago, the nation was transfixed by images of migrant children forcibly separated from their parents and placed in cages. A recording of screaming babies and toddlers wailing for “Mami!” and “Papá!” went viral, leaving listeners in chills and tears.

Six weeks is an eternity in our current political environment. During that span of time, our attention has been diverted to a whole string of shiny objects, including Trump’s Helsinki love fest with Putin, the failure of his imaginary peace with North Korea, his threats against Iran, audio of his plans for a Playboy model payoff, and a $12 billion bailout for farmers hurt by his trade war, among far too many others. It’s hard to keep the focus on the thousands of children torn from their parents, and emotionally maimed for life by the country that once welcomed immigrants with the words: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”

Turn the clock back 19 years, to a simpler place and time, though it didn’t seem like it then. The nation was captivated by a similar story, except that this was a single 6-year-old migrant child, a Cuban separated from his parents while politicians fought bitterly over his fate. Elián González was found stranded on an inner tube near the Fort Lauderdale shoreline in 1999. Like the Central American parents caught up in Trump’s zero tolerance nightmare, Elián’s mother had been desperately searching for a better place to raise her son when they set sail on a rickety raft to escape deteriorating economic conditions. Sadly, she drowned en route. Elián was rescued by two fishermen and eventually taken in by extended family members in Miami – Elián’s great uncles – who had themselves fled Castro’s Cuba years earlier.

That might have been the end of the story if not for two salient subplots: Elián had entered the country illegally, and he had a father in Cuba who wanted him to come home. The battle lines were drawn. On one side was Miami’s anti-Castro Cuban community, fully backed by Republicans, insisting that poor, little Elián should be lovingly embraced by the welcoming America of his mother’s dreams. On the other side was the boy’s father, backed by the Castro government and Democrats on the basis that Elián was a Cuban citizen who, by rule of law in both countries, belonged with his father.

While the court battles raged on, Elián’s story evolved into a year-long media frenzy. By the end of 2000, the tale of this one child had been given the second largest volume of television coverage in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O.J. Simpson case. There were books, films, talk radio programs, songs, t-shirts, posters, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, even a South Park episode devoted to the fate of this one young child. Ultimately, the federal courts determined that the government has a duty to “(reunite) unaccompanied alien children with a parent abroad. . .” To carry out that order, armed U.S. marshals stormed into the Miami home of Elián’s relatives, and removed the boy at gunpoint. He was ultimately reunited with his father in Cuba where he was treated like royalty by Fidel Castro. Elián is now an engineer and a frequent good will ambassador for the Cuban government.

What a difference two decades make. Donald Trump carried Florida in the 2016 election, in large part, with the backing of Miami’s Cuban-American immigrants who were still angry with the Clintons for supporting Elián’s return to Cuba. Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican attorney who unsuccessfully argued the case for keeping the boy in the U.S. so he could have a better life, is now the Supreme Court nominee of a president who ordered children snatched from their parents in order to keep “shithole” riffraff out of the country.

The biggest change, however, is in the numbers. Elián was a singular emblematic symbol who resonated with deep tones of empathy on both sides of the battle. His boyish face, his smiles, his tears were with us for 13 months, embedding themselves into the fabric of our lives, at a time of far fewer distractions.

We now have thousands of babies, toddlers, young children, separated from their parents and enduring forms of abuse that would trigger an immediate social service intervention in any jurisdiction. What we don’t have are their names or pictures. We don’t have anything resembling the Elián González story arc to keep this dystopian drama on the center stage of public life.

All we know is that 711 children remain in perpetual custody, with no end to their family separations in sight. One young toddler died of a respiratory illness after her release from a Texas detention center. A six-year-old girl was sexually assaulted in an Arizona lockup, and then forced to sign a form agreeing to keep her distance from her alleged assailant. Then she was molested again. A least 70 babies, all under a year old, have been hauled before immigration judges. They have no legal representation and are absurdly asked, by rules of the court, whether they understand the deportation proceedings against them.

Ivanka Trump this week called her father’s family separation plan the “low point” of his administration, as if this brutal, premeditated assault on humanity was a mere past tense blip. Hardly. The government, which was warned in advance of launching this draconian immigration offensive that separating children from their parents would cause “traumatic psychological injury”, says 460 parents of kids in federal custody have already been deported. Nobody knows what will become of their children, now languishing in unsafe and unregulated makeshift detention facilities.

Republicans once saw America as a welcoming beacon in the night to little Elián on his inner tube. No more. They are now enabling a broken and demented president, a man who, by his own admission, would rather look strong than show compassion for defenseless children. Somehow, some way, we must persevere through the daily din of Trumpian noise, and make sure that the electorate never forgets the lasting pain and trauma this man inflicted on all of those children who came looking for a better life and ended up in cages.

BLATHERER-IN-CHIEF DESERVES ZERO TOLERANCE

This was the toughest week yet in our abominable Trumpian nightmare. The visceral pain of children pulled from their parents’ arms was exasperated by the president’s repeated lies, and the abject dysfunction of a government gone mad.

Still, the Donald managed to trot out a slogan that describes his presidency with amazing accuracy: “Zero Tolerance”. In the interest of truth-in-labeling, those are the words that should adorn his red baseball caps. After this week – and the 75 weeks that preceded it, “Make America Great Again” is a brutally inaccurate description of this dystopia. “Zero Tolerance” really nails it.

This president, and his merry band of hateful sycophants, have zero tolerance for truth, decency, complexity or compassion. They have zero tolerance for the poor, or for those who are neither white nor male. On a deeply personal, existential level, Donald J. Trump has zero tolerance for anyone who is not him, although he has been known to carve out an exception for those who carry his DNA, and/or bow down and worship him.

The atrociousness of this president’s conduct seems to be reaching new lows on a regular basis. It’s like waiting for an addict to hit rock bottom, only to realize there is no bottom, only an indeterminate descension. That means we miss, or forget, so many of Trump’s incomprehensible utterances while preoccupied with the major horror stories of the day. When fixated on images of tormented children wailing in cages, it’s difficult to focus on off-the-wall presidential statements, particularly when there are so many of them.

As a public service, I offer this small sample of presidential inanities, some of Trump’s more bizarre words that may have been lost in the smoke from the American values he’s trying to burn:

JUDICIAL GRAFT. In a speech to a business group this week, Trump ridiculed his own administration’s proposal to hire thousands of new immigration judges to relieve the backlog at the border. Said the president, mocking his own Justice Department, “Seriously, what country does this? Thousands and thousands of judges they want to hire. Who are these people?” Then came the kicker: “Now can you imagine,” the president asked, “the graft that must take place?” This is the president of the United States accusing federal immigration judges of being on the take. Not only is there no evidence, or even a credible accusation, of such corruption, it’s hard to imagine a Honduran migrant stepping off a raft from Mexico with the wherewithal to bribe an immigration judge.

SPACE FORCE. The president proposed a new military branch this week, the “Space Force”. Beaming before the cameras, he boasted that it will be “separate but equal” to the Air Force. Trump is the first president to trot out that old Jim Crow phrase since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate is inherently unequal”.

MINING HIS THOUGHTS. In a Duluth, Minnesota speech Wednesday, Trump addressed a highly controversial local issue involving proposals to mine precious metals in that state. Here’s what he said: “We’ll do it carefully and if it doesn’t pass muster, maybe we don’t do it at all. But it’s going to happen, I will tell you.”

CANADIAN SHOES. In one of his many warning shots over Canadian tariffs, the president claimed that our neighbors to the north are smuggling goods across the border. “They buy shoes,” he said, “then they wear them. They scuff them up. They make them sound old or look old.” He offered no further explanation but ended his remarks with this aspiration: “We can no longer be the stupid country. We want to be the smart country.”

WHATCHAMACALLIT HOUSE. Standing next to the Easter Bunny and the First Lady during last spring’s White House egg roll, Trump tried to thank his wife for keeping “this incredible house, or building – or whatever you want to call it, because there really is no name for it, it is special.” You’d think it would be easy for this white nationalist president to remember that he lives in the White House.

BOWLING FOR TARIFFS. Here’s how Trump, in a recent speech, described how Japan keeps American cars out of their country: “It’s the bowling ball test. They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and drop it on the hood of the car. If the hood dents, the car doesn’t qualify.” It was unclear what he meant and the White House communication office had no comment.

INSPIRING GRADUATES. Here’s the profound inspiration the commander in chief shared with this year’s graduating class at the U.S. Naval Academy: “Winning is such a great feeling, isn’t it? Winning is such a great feeling. Nothing like winning, you got to win.”

OPIOIDS. In a Nashville speech, Trump boasted – incorrectly – that the country’s opioid addiction problem was lessening, thanks to his program. Here’s how he described that program: “We’re getting the word out – bad. Bad stuff. You go to the hospital, you have a broken arm; you come out, you’re a drug addict with this crap. It’s way down. We’re doing a good job with it.”

SPACEY INFINITY. After signing an executive order on space exploration, the president waxed philosophical about what might be out there to explore. “A lotta room out there, right?” he said. “This is infinity here. It could be infinity. We don’t really know. But it could be. It has to be something – but it could be infinity, right?”

THE POOR NEED NOT APPLY. In a Georgia speech, Trump professed his love for the poor but drew the line at hiring them. Here is what he said: “And I love all people, rich or poor, but in those particular positions I just don’t want a poor person. Does that make sense?”

Sadly, there is absolutely nothing about this man, his presidency, or his monopolization of our thoughts these past 16 months that makes the slightest bit of sense. When it comes to Donald J. Trump, all we are left with is Zero Tolerance.

FORGET STORMY, COMEY & MUELLER, TRUMP IS TRASHING AMERICA

President Trump should be grateful for the Mueller investigation. Thanks to the special counsel’s work, news producers and consumers are obsessed with the daily minutia of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice theories, not to mention the deeply profound question of who paid Stormy and why. Easily missed is the most important story of this administration: Donald Trump is making America terrible again.

Yes, Russia’s interference in our elections is a big deal. So are alleged presidential attempts to interfere in the investigation of that foreign intrusion. But the daily bombardment of speculation, Trump attorney churn and bizarre Rudy Giuliani proclamations seems to have crafted a useful, even if inadvertent, cover for the severe damage the 45th president is doing to our country.

We desperately need an end to this American nightmare. Yet, unless a Nixonian-like smoking gun tumbles out of Mueller’s shop, impeachment is a longshot. A two-thirds Senate vote is needed to remove a president. That’s never happened, and it’s unlikely to any time soon, absent blockbuster evidence that would pull Republican senators away from a president who remains dismayingly popular with his party. A shoot-and-miss runs the risk of burnishing Trump’s outside martyr credentials for a 2020 reelection campaign. Six-and-a-half more years of Trump shredding America’s values is unthinkable.

That’s why Democrats need to march into the midterm elections with a substantive agenda for truly turning this country around. That means quantifying the damage done these past 16 months and offering a plan to reverse it, not merely running on an impeachment promise.

Here’s just some of the ways Trump’s administration has reversed decades, if not centuries, of American progress:

BIGOTRY RUNS RAMPANT. Emboldened by their president, bigots have come out from under their rocks, openly spewing their hate at anyone who is not an American-born white male. Every published study shows dramatic increases in hate crimes against blacks, Latinos, Muslims, women, and the LGBTQ community. One source pegged such incidents at 250,000 a year. Another study showed that one in five hate crimes was committed by people using Trump’s name. For example, this letter sent to at least 10 mosques across the country in 2017: “To the children of Satan, you Muslims are vile and filthy people. . .There’s a new sheriff in town – President Donald Trump. He’s going to cleanse America and make it shine again. . .You Muslims would be wise to pack your bags and get out of Dodge.”

SEGREGATED NEIGHBORHOODS are encouraged. The Trump administration suspended a rule requiring communities receiving federal housing funds to assess patterns of segregation and barriers to fair housing and devise plans to combat them. HUD Secretary Ben Carson called such desegregation goals “failed socialist experiments”.

SICK CHILDREN are shortchanged. Just this week, Trump asked Congress to cut more than $7 billion out of already approved funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program in order to demonstrate fiscal constraint in the wake of huge budget deficits brought on by tax cuts for the rich.

MIGRANT CHILDREN are being separated from their parents. Trump’s Justice Department announced Monday that it will prosecute every migrant fleeing violence in Central America who crosses illegally into the United States. That means children will be taken away from their parents who will be immediately incarcerated. The previous practice was to treat such migrants as asylum seekers, not criminals, and allow the families to remain together in this country while their asylum request was considered.

HEALTH INSURANCE PREMIUMS are soaring. Insurers say Trump’s successful push to end the individual mandate that required everyone to be insured has created a “death spiral” for the market. Insurance executives predict that premiums will increase by steep double-digits in 2019 as a result of healthy people stopping their coverage.

CONSUMER PROTECTION has been gutted. Trump has brought the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to a virtual standstill. Investigations into questionable business practices have ended. Hiring is frozen. No data is being collected and a database of consumer complaints is in the process of being dismantled. Existing cases against companies are being closed or put on indefinite hold. The department is expected to drop a major case against Navient, the student loan company accused of cheating borrowers.

The list of hits to the American people goes on and on. Trump’s much ballyhooed tax bill did zilch for the working class. Corporations, for the most part, used their enormous windfalls to repurchase about $800 billion of their own stock. Meanwhile, worker pay has barely moved. Close to a million immigrants, most with black or brown skin, are subject to deportation under Trump’s policies. This includes hundreds of thousands of young people brought here as children and who know no other home. The environment has been devastated by such Trumpian moves as eliminating regulations on carbon emissions from coal-based power plants, opening vast swaths of Alaskan wilderness to new oil and gas drilling and the reversal of another 29 environmental regulations.

Never has this country fallen so quickly from its core values. That’s why Democrats need to make the midterm elections all about truly restoring America’s greatness – without the red hats. As despicable as this president has been, this campaign cycle has to be about more than just Trump. We’ve been in an All-Trump-All-The-Time world since November 8, 2016. We need to focus now on the specific ways we can disengage from this dystopia and take our country back.

That means talking about true tax reform and a fair redistribution of wealth that will provide meaningful help to the poor and middle class. It means finding a way to let every kid who wants a college education to have one, without crippling student loans. It means having a sensible, fair and compassionate immigration policy, one that never closes our borders on the basis of race or religion. It means taking reasonable steps to protect our planet. It means renouncing every form of bigotry, and unabashedly protecting human rights whenever, and wherever, they may be endangered. This, after all, is what America is all about. As Trump mania blasts at us 24-7, let us never lose sight of that fact.

(Scheduling note: Due to a long-planned retirement trip in honor of my wife and editor, Melissa, this space will remain dark for a couple weeks. We will be back shortly after Memorial Day.)

IMMIGRATION REFORM: TRUMP’S WHITE POWER MOVEMENT

Every once in a while, even as we grow numb with the clownish inanity of all things Trump, there arises a clarion call of meaning about this presidency, a diabolical message seeped in the worst traditions of America’s past. It was there in his nod to white supremacists in Charlottesville. It was there when he called Haiti and African nations “shithole countries.” And, most assuredly, it was there in a recent Washington Post analysis showing that Trump’s immigration plan would let white people cling to their majority status for up to five more years. In case there was ever a doubt, making America white again is what the Trump odyssey is all about.

The president is insisting that any immigration bill must drastically reduce the number of legal immigrants allowed to enter the country. According to the Post, such a move would disproportionately affect black and brown immigrants. Current census projections predict that whites will become a minority in this country in 2044. Trump’s proposed immigration restrictions could delay that seminal demographic shift until 2049. Those are metrics most of us rarely think about, but they represent the lifeblood of Trump diehards, angry white folks who feel they are being pushed aside by people of other races and ethnicities.

Racism isn’t merely one of many character flaws of our 45th president. It was the driving force behind his candidacy and it continues to fuel a cult-like base that worships at Trump’s altar and sees him as their last Great White Hope. This is not to say that the president is not also misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. There is no human right this guy won’t obliterate. Yet, the race card is always on top of his deck. And for good reason: Without the divide between white and non-white, this presidency is finished.

There is an overwhelming mountain of evidence that racism fueled Trump’s ride to the White House (here, here and here). He tapped into . . .no, he plowed into . . . a visceral strain of Caucasian anxiety and resentment, a feeling that white folks were being left behind in a country of people who no longer looked like them. Trump did something that no politician since the early days of George Wallace had even attempted: He made bigotry great again. For his followers, that is. He pulled it out of the darkness and onto the center stage of his campaign. Immigration policy is complicated, layered and nuanced, and Trump can’t be bothered with the details. All he cares about is the bottom line. If the number of black and brown people in this country can be significantly reduced, it’s a good day for Team Trump and the base.

As shocking as this phenomena may be to millennials – and to boomers with fading memories – there is nothing new here. Before the 1964 Civil Rights Act’s ink was dry, Republicans were pushing their “Southern Strategy” to cash in on a raging white backlash against the end of Jim Crow laws. In every national election since, the GOP has milked white racism to its advantage, albeit with dog whistles through talk of “law and order”, “welfare queens” and “states’ rights”. Trump got rid of the dog whistles and dropped the subtlety. As much as we may have wanted the stain of our dark racial history to have remained in the past, it is very much part of our present. A major 2016 study showed that the number of slaves owned in southern counties more than 150 years ago accurately predicts the number of white voters who today identify as Republican and express racial resentment toward blacks. The higher the number of slaves, the more anti-black Republican voters.

A Richard Nixon campaign aide told the New York Times in 1970 that “. . .political success goes to the party that can cohesively hold together the largest number of ethnic prejudices.” Nixon’s Southern Strategy carried the day for him in 1968. According to historians, Nixon’s appeal to white racists came through his running mate, Spiro Agnew, a Trump-like persona with a larger and more alliterative vocabulary. Agnew once called an Asian-American reporter a “fat Jap” and referred to the press corps as “nattering nabobs of negativism”. He expressed nothing but contempt for black civil rights leaders, calling them “circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type leaders.”

As the New Republic’s Jeet Heer observed, this Southern Strategy of turning white racial resentment into GOP votes was “the original sin that made Donald Trump possible.” Republican elites like Paul Ryan, who called Trump a racist during the campaign but has embraced him ever since, now own him and his unvarnished racism. “In truth,” as Heer put it, “he is their true heir, the beneficiary of the policies the party pursued for more than a half a century.”

There is something to be said for clarity. As the unapologetic cheerleader for white supremacy, Trump has given us a binary choice, more stark, momentous and crucial than this country has faced since the start of the never-ending Civil War. He has put racism on the ballot. Now that bigotry is no longer disguised with code words and knowing winks, the choice is clear. If you believe in racism, Trump is your guy. If you reject racism, you have to reject Trump, and with him, all the Republican sheep in his flock.

Long live the Resistance! Either we nail this, or we slip ever further into the abyss of highly uncivil rights.

ENDING THE SHUTDOWN MAY HAVE AVERTED A DREAMER NIGHTMARE

Senate Democrats didn’t mess up by ending an embryonic government shutdown. Their mistake was using the tactic in the first place. Quickly retreating from a bad decision, a foreign concept to the current president and his Republican sycophants, is smart and effective leadership.

Linking immigration rights for the Dreamers with the GOP spending bill made sense earlier this month – an eternity ago in this bizarre political climate. Senate Republicans needed Democratic votes to pass a resolution keeping the government open. Democrats needed to find a way to keep undocumented young people brought into the country as children from being deported. Donald Trump told the world that he wanted to save the Dreamers through a “bill of love” and would sign any bipartisan immigration measure the Senate came up with.

The Capitol was hardly ensconced in a spirit of peace and love, but – for one brief, shining moment – there was real anticipation of at least a little give-and-take, the likes of which have not been seen here in more than a generation. Then Trump offered his “shithole countries” soliloquy, and Kumbaya morphed into a war chant.

The Donald’s boasts about his stellar negotiating skills have all the credibility of his claim to the be the world’s least racist person. There isn’t a rule of effective negotiating that he doesn’t regularly violate, including the one about not going back on your word. Days after telling a bipartisan Senate delegation that he would accept whatever immigration plan they came up with, and two hours after signaling his agreement with their proposal, Trump did a complete reversal and embraced the entire draconian screed of the anti-immigration hawks.

Although the rug had been pulled out from under them, Democrats stayed the tactical course of making immigration the quid-pro-quo for producing the needed votes to avoid a shutdown. The narrative quickly changed. It was no longer about Democrats helping Republicans pass a budget bill in exchange for protecting the Dreamers. It had become, through optics pushed by right wing messaging, a matter of Democrats forcing a shutdown to protect illegal immigrants. Besides, the leverage had no juice. The Trumpian gang got where they are by promising to drain the swamp. They abhor government. It’s the Democrats who believe in government and what it can do to make people’s lives better. Although the Dreamers have had strong public support, most polls showed substantial public anxiety over a prolonged government shutdown on their behalf.

That left Democrats in a weakened strategic position. Closing the government was hardly an effective club to use on a party that dislikes government. Yes, the talking point here was that Republicans would suffer from a shutdown since they control Congress and the White House. But the reality was that government closed because Democrats insisted to impasse on an immigration deal in exchange for the spending measure. That had the potential, particularly for the long haul, of weakening public support for the Dreamers.

I get the angst and disappointment of my friends on the left, and particularly on the part of those young people who grew up as Americans and see the clock ticking on possible deportation to countries they view as foreign. The pre-shutdown rhetoric of Democratic leaders about there being no spending bill without taking care of the Dreamers was powerful, passionate and hopeful. But, despite the message of many self-help books, a determination to win doesn’t guaranty victory. A prolonged government shutdown was simply not the instrument to induce surrender by a majority party that cares nothing about the fate of young immigrants, government workers or the people they serve. It would be like kidnapping Hillary Clinton and asking Donald Trump to pay the ransom.

By agreeing to fund government for another three weeks, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer not only bought time, he also brought the narrative back where it belonged, namely on how to keep the Dreamers from being deported. No longer is Trump’s campaign machine cranking out ads about Democrats shutting down government in order to help “illegal aliens.” Instead, late this week, the president put the White House on record for the first time in support of a bill that would not only give work permits to about 1.8 million young immigrants but would also grant them a path to citizenship.

Yes, Trump’s blink on the Dreamers, was in the context of an overall immigration proposal that would also include $25 billion in funding for his wall, along with severe reductions in the number of immigrants allowed into the country. It now seems more likely than ever that a bipartisan group in the Senate will produce a bill that follows the president’s position on the Dreamers but pushes back in some other areas.

To be sure, we are not yet at the end of the road on all of this. It remains very much an uphill battle for Democrats. They are, after all, Washington’s minority party right now. But hard, fruitful negotiations are still ongoing. And that would not be happening if the government remained shut down. The chatter would never have risen above the finger pointing.

Instead, the endgame offers two broad scenarios . One is a deal that overcomes the worst of right wing ideology and paves the way for nearly two million young people to become citizens. The other is, at the hands of Republicans, a defeat for any Dreamer protection legislation. That would be one more clarion call for a congressional realignment in this fall’s midterm elections. Either outcome is better than a protracted government shutdown with both sides accusing the other of causing it.

TRUMP’S SECOND YEAR IS ALREADY IN THE SHITTER

As dawn breaks on a second year of Republican control, our federal government dangles from this binary precipice of indelicate nuance: shitholes or shithouses? Which term did the president of the United States use to characterize third world countries of black and brown people? If this were a movie, now would be a good time to locate the nearest exit and use it. Who wants to watch such garbage? Alas, this is no celluloid fiction. It’s our life, our new reality, a bizarre sideshow of existence that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

For those fortunate enough to have spent the past few days in a deep coma, here’s a quick recap: Donald Trump met with a few senators in an attempt to reach a bipartisan agreement on immigration. The meeting went badly. According to some participants, Trump kept complaining about having to take immigrants from Haiti and impoverished African countries he called “shitholes.” Instead of opening our borders to, say, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”, Trump pushed for a “merit-based” system in which we would take only good, lutefisk-eating white folks from places like Norway.

Well, the shithole hit the fan, causing a cascade of impassioned statements of repudiation from leaders throughout the world, Norway included. Initially, there was no denial from the White House. That’s because Trump surveyed his friends who told him not to worry since his base will love the comment. After a few days of constant heat, however, Trump and a couple Republican senators who were at the meeting said the president’s exact words were not “shithole countries.” That created a narrative that Trump had been misquoted, that he never uttered the word “shithole”. It turns out, according to the Washington Post, that what the Republican senators heard Trump say was that he didn’t want to take in people from “shithouse countries.” A quick review of etymological research shows no measurable differences between “shithole” and “shithouse”.

Yet, this unique linguistic dialectic, together with Trump’s incendiary message that non-whites from troubled countries should be kept out of the U.S., is now threating to shut down the federal government. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday to avoid such closure, and part of that package was supposed to include immigration reform. Some sort of deal may yet emerge, but for the moment the shithole/shithouse conundrum seems to have brought what’s left of governance to a standstill.

Despite headlines decrying the president’s “vulgarity,” his use of a four-letter word for excrement – “s***”, as many news outlets coded it – was not the offense here. What really offended, stung and hurt was his raw, brazen racism and xenophobia driving his position that our borders should be closed to dark-skinned people from poor countries.

No, this is nothing new. Donald Trump kicked off his campaign by calling Mexicans racists. He suggested fighting terrorism by executing Muslims with bullets dipped in pig blood. He has called black people “lazy” and insisted that all Haitian immigrants have AIDS. His complete list of racist credentials takes up far more real estate than is available here. The most astute and best researched analyses of the 2016 election points to racism as the most important factor driving the Trump victory (here, here and here). So why all the shock over Trump calling impoverished black countries shitholes?

Because Trumpism, in all of its vile and despicable manifestations, remains a relatively new phenomena. We still remember and cling to the real spirit and essence of the American ideal: equality, justice, liberty and opportunity for all. There is precious little on the national scene to feel good about today. But, for now at least, we have this: wide spread disgust with a president who vulgarizes those core values that make it possible for America to be great. Let us hope we never reach the point of NOT being shocked, outraged and saddened by the racist words, actions and policies of this president. Trumpism must never be normalized.

There is another reason why many are shocked by what we’ve come to expect and anticipate from our president. It is difficult to process a constant stream of horror in daily White House utterances and tweets. While we struggle to wrap our heads around Trump’s taunt that he has a bigger nuclear button than North Korea’s, we are hit with the news that the President believes himself to be a “stable genius.” Before we can figure that one out, the shithole story breaks. We are so busy processing all this really weird shit, as George W. Bush might call it, we all have different a-ha moments.

Except, that is, for the Republican establishment. It appears that nothing, not even self-preservation, will dislodge the GOP’s shameful and embarrassing enablement of a pathetic, solipsistic, racist president who continues to degrade the party’s brand on a daily basis. Congressional Republican leaders have had a year of way too many opportunities to cut their losses and distance themselves from a maniacal autocrat who never cared a whit about them or their party. Playing word games, and ignoring the broader racist message, won’t save them now. He’s their president. They own him. Let them all be buried in the same shithole.

TRUMP’S ‘GOOD WEEK’ IS JUST MORE OF THE SAME

To hear Donald Trump tell it, he had his best week yet in Washington. The president bitch slapped his own party’s Congressional leaders. Then he hugged Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and even let House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dictate a Twitter message for him. Not only that, he helped secure rare bipartisan support for a bill that will get Texas some hurricane relief and keep the government open for three more months. Could this, the Donald’s 137th reinvention, be the one that really sticks? Could it be that he has finally become presidential?

Naaaa, of course not. This was just one more iteration of Trump being Trump. When it comes to his core values, he has always been consistent. And what he really values, at his core, is himself, and how he looks to the world at any moment in time. “It’s all over the news,” the president bubbled in a call to Schumer. “The coverage is incredible; everyone is praising me. Even MSNBC is saying nice things about me.” (Here and here.)

And that’s what it takes for Donald Trump to have a very good week. There was a time he had to really work to create the public illusion of grandeur. Like when he impersonated his own press agent in order to spread lurid reports about his love life to gossip columnists. It’s so much easier now. All he has to do is make nice with a couple of Democrats he spent the last six months vilifying.

Back in the real world, North Korea is polishing its nukes, 800,000 young Americans face deportation, and there is no assurance our government will be funded past December 8. Trump’s feel-good days of early September offer no nourishment for a body politic that has been ailing since January 20. For that, we need skilled leadership, someone with credibility, vision, a sense of direction and an ability to subjugate ego needs for the sake of getting the job done. Alas, Trump is a dismal failure in all four areas. He is constitutionally incapable of getting outside of himself in order to lead others. The president’s euphoric week was packed with evidence supporting the previous sentence.

It started with the dreamers, the now young adults whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children. Through a 2012 executive order, the Obama administration protected them from deportation. Trump excoriated Obama for that action during the campaign, promising, if elected, to send them all back to the countries of their birth. Then he softened a bit, telling the dreamers not to worry because he loves them. However, as the songwriter noted, love hurts. On Tuesday the administration pulled the plug on the dreamers, announcing that they would be subject to deportation in March if Congress did not resolve the issue through legislation. That was it. The president took no position on what Congress should do – protect them or evict them. He just wanted the monkey off his back. Amazingly, the New York Times quoted White House aides saying their boss did not appear to fully understand the meaning of his announcement an hour before it was delivered.

The public response was overwhelming negative. So Trump, naturally, turned to Twitter for a mood adjustment. His message: if Congress doesn’t act, he will “revisit” the issue. For someone who fancies himself as a master negotiator, this was an incredibly insipid move. It instantly deflated the leverage he created by linking the dreamers’ deportation to a failure of Congress to act. But it made him feel better for a while.

Then came the infamous Oval Office meeting with Congressional leaders. The Republicans, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, wanted to raise the debt limit and keep government funded for 18 months, getting them past the mid-term elections. Schumer and Pelosi wanted only a three-month extension because it would give them leverage in a year-end funding battle. Ryan called the Democrat’s three-month proposal “ridiculous and disgusting.” Trump’s partner in the meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had just delivered a defense of the Republican’s 18-month plan when Trump shocked the room by siding with the Democrats, whose three-month deal was soon summarily passed by both houses, much to the chagrin of frustrated Republicans.

It was the news of that meeting that gave Trump his good week. He could view himself as a bipartisan deal-maker. Basking in the mania of that image, Trump upped the ante, by joining with “Chuck and Nancy” in supporting a law protecting the dreamers. A day later, he went even further and said he agreed with Schumer that Congress should end the requirement of regularly approving the government’s debt limit, a sacred conservative ritual if there ever was one.

The pundits have had a field day with it all. Some compared it to Bill Clinton’s triangulation. Some wondered if Trump was finally finding his footing. Others, noting that the president was once a Democrat, speculated he might be returning to his roots. The analysis is about as meaningful as trying to figure out why a leaf suddenly falls from a tree. That’s what a leaf does. And this is what the Donald does: grab whatever attention he can to make him look and feel good in the moment. As Poe says, “merely this and nothing more.”

The problem is that moments are outlived by their consequences. Strategies are designed to build a multiplicity of moments that will get you to where you want to go, assuming you know where that is. Trump doesn’t get any of that. He’s too wrapped up in watching himself on cable news to realize that when you blindside associates – on either side, when you yank the rug out from under your treasury secretary, when you love dreamers one day and move to deport them the next, you lack the credibility, integrity and probity needed to lead. You’re just a leaf sailing through the breeze. ‘Tis the wind and nothing more.

TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY: NOT NEARLY AS FUN AS THE CAMPAIGN RALLIES

The Trumpian savior narrative that, against all odds and common sense, propelled The Donald into the White House is quickly devolving into that “Wizard of Oz” scene when the purportedly all-powerful wizard turns out to be nothing more than an impotent old man barking orders in a gruff voice. Trump, who boasted throughout his campaign that “I alone” can fix the country’s problems, reached the end of his Yellow Brick Road this week when three federal appellate judges pulled back the Oz curtain to tell the president that the office does not come with absolute powers of wizardry.

Trump, boasting that he is a man of action, moved quickly to block travel into the U.S. from seven Muslim majority countries, causing colossal confusion and disarray at airports throughout the world. Earlier this week, James L. Robart, a federal judge appointed by George W. Bush, lifted Trump’s ban by granting two states and a host of supporters a temporary restraining order. A dismayed Trump, shocked that anyone in a robe would second guess him, let it rip on Twitter, calling Robart a “so-called judge” and insisting that his “ridiculous” opinion would be overturned. Two days later, however, a unanimous three-judge panel of the Ninth District Circuit Court of Appeals, upheld the injunction and rejected the Trump administration’s position that the president’s order was unreviewable.

That was quite a jolt for Trump and his fans. The entire premise of his candidacy and presidency has been that the guy, in his magnificent omnipotence, would singlehandedly drain the swamp and blow things up because . . .well, because nobody else can. “Believe me,” Trump repeatedly preached during his campaign, “it’s going to be great.” The lesson here is that in government, as in theology, belief alone is never sufficient. Process matters.

And therein lies the problem. Trump is not a process kind of guy. He made it all sound so simple during his rallies: “Build the Wall;” “Close the Borders”; “Ban the Muslims.” His crowds loved all of the hits and begged for more. “Lock Her Up” never failed to bring the faithful to their feet, waving lighters in the darkness, as if Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band had finally launched into “Born to Run.”

I suspect Trump is longing for those glory days, the rallies, the slogans and, most importantly, the adulation from fans genuflecting every time he said “believe me.” Now he has to make those slogans come to life in a governance structure he shares with two co-equal partners, Congress and the judiciary. He hasn’t figured out yet that bullying both of them on Twitter is probably not the best way to advance his program.

Obviously, power sharing and collaboration are not in this president’s vocabulary or life experience. The open question is whether he will learn from his mistakes. There is a good chance, for example, that Trump could have succeeded with his executive order, had he thoroughly vetted it with agency, congressional and legal authorities well versed with immigration law. Instead, it was hastily thrown together by inexperienced staffers so Trump could fulfill his self-image of a “man of action,” quickly giving life to one of his campaign slogans. He may eventually prevail in this legal battle, but for now the ban is not in place and the people he wants to keep out of the country are free to come on in. That’s a far cry from those “believe me” campaign rallies.

And it’s not just immigration. A month ago, Trump said Obamacare would be repealed and replaced in January. “We’re all set to go, right down to the final strokes,” he said. Two days ago, the president acknowledged that a replacement plan might not be ready until 2018. He insisted that his “big, beautiful wall” would be built immediately and paid for by Mexico. Reuters reported this week that a Homeland Security study estimates the wall will cost $21.6 billion and take 3.5 years to build. There is no rush in Congress to appropriate the money that Mexico refuses to put up. The wall remains more an instrument of metaphor than architecture.

Remember back in the campaign when Trump characterized all of his opponents as having some sort of congenital weakness, leaving him as the only strong man who can stand up to all of the world leaders and not be pushed around? His rally crowds swooned over their candidate’s ability to tell anyone what he thinks of them. Venting, it turns out, is not an effective strategy. Trump so angered Mexico’s president over the pay-for-wall business that he canceled a scheduled White House visit. Then he ripped into the Australian prime minister in a courtesy introductory phone chat and proceeded to brag about his electoral vote margin. Contrary to his campaign rhetoric about how he was going to all by himself, take on China, President Trump ended up backing down in his first phone conversation with China President Xi Jinping yesterday. Analysts immediately declared that Trump lost his first fight with China. Weak.

In other words, there is a world of difference between campaign illusions and actual accomplishments. Leaders – of a student council or a country – ignore process at their peril. If Trump really thought he was going to ram his rally hits into national policy by the strength of his will alone, he was badly mistaken. With a Republican Congress, he ought to be able to accomplish much of his agenda if he reaches out to lawmakers, listens to advice from people who know how the swamp operates, and treats adversaries with respect. Of course, if he did all that he wouldn’t be Trump.

So far, this much is comforting: the roadblocks Trump has encountered on his “I alone” march show the wisdom of the checks and balances baked into our system. Right now, they alone stand between us and tyranny.