June 21, 2018: Crying Babies at the Border Don't Look Good - So Trump Tries Lying

 

6/21/18: The president wakes up in a sour mood, having been forced to sign an executive order to end a policy his administration invented. 

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“The crying babies doesn’t look good politically.” 

President Trump

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You might think Trump felt bad for the kids, as he claimed yesterday. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,” he said. 

But he didn’t care about saving the kids – he only cared about saving his big orange political butt. 

Meeting with GOP lawmakers Tuesday, to figure out how to clean up the mess he and his aides made, Trump wasn’t thinking about children. First, he talked about how popular he was. His approval rating as of today: 43.7 percent. Finally, he got down to business. He wanted Congress to pass legislation that would make it look like he wasn’t backing down on his zero-tolerance policy. According to one lawmaker who was there, Trump grumbled that “the crying babies doesn’t look good politically.” 

In fact: they don’t look good, humanly.

 

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MEANWHILE, ORANGE DON was doing his best to spin retreat into victory. He insisted it had taken “great courage” to end a policy that had been a problem for “sixty years.” (More like sixty days, since the policy was implemented on April 6, under order from Attorney General Jeff Sessions.) 

Again, you can find the order on the Department of Justice website. 

Ivanka thanks dad for undoing damage dad did.

 

Then, Trump did what he does best. He blamed everyone else. First, Mexico wasn’t helping guard the border. They were letting all kinds of bad people come across. “We’re getting some real beauties,” he grumbled. Then he said Obama’s policy in 2014 was terrible and quoted someone who said it was “inhumane,” which means if he, Trump, locked up toddlers, Obama was worse. He insisted Democrats were the problem. All they did in Congress was “obstruct.” 

“They have no ideas,” he said. 

Ironically, the House of Representatives was scheduled to vote on two immigration bills crafted entirely by Republicans. They put up the first, which the extreme conservative wing of the party preferred. It failed. The Republicans hold 246 seats, need 218 votes on the bill they wrote, and can’t get them. 

The New York Daily News explains what the bill included and what its failure meant: 

The conservative bill sought funding for Trump’s long-promised border wall, backed the President’s calls for curbs on legal immigration and increased spending on border security. It also denied a path to citizenship for young undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.

 

If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, a compromise bill was pulled without a vote, even though – again – Republicans have enough votes to pass it themselves. House leaders promised to put it up for a vote tomorrow. On second thought, House leaders said an hour later, no, they wouldn’t.

 

In a snippet of good news, however, Rep. Mike Conway (R-Co.) does come up with one great and one greater idea regarding immigration. In a pair of tweets, he makes his disgust clear: 

I’m glad the President ended the border separation policy, but there’s more work to do. I’m going to the border in TX myself this weekend to see the situation firsthand and learn more about what needs to get done. The President should put a General, a respected retired CEO.

 

..or some other senior leadership figure on the job of making sure each and every child is returned to their parents. And the President should fire Stephen Miller now. This is a human rights mess. It is on the President to clean it up and fire the people responsible for making it. (See: 6/18/18.)

 

Indeed.

 

BLOGGER’S NOTE (6/1/2021): Trump doesn’t fire Miller. Rather, Miller survives to the bitter end of the Trump administration. Then he gets a job working for Trump in exile, so-to-speak, at Mar-a-Lago.