Trump loves dreamers, and deports them
We’ve learned a lot about Donald Trump in the last seven months. He’s inept. Think repeal of Obamacare. He’s ignorant. Think withdrawal from Paris Accords. He’s clueless. Think sending 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan. He’s petty. Think firing James Comey.
But this week we learned something new about Donald Trump. He’s also cruel and cold-hearted. Think Dreamers. Outside the warped mind of openly racist Attorney General Jeff Sessions, there’s no justification for Trump’s decision to terminate the Dreamers program, or DACA, launched by President Obama five years ago.
Sessions, who led the opposition to the Dreamers Act in the Senate for 16 years, convinced Trump that DACA offered blanket amnesty and citizenship to people who’d broken the law — and that we had no choice but to throw those criminals out of the country. He’s dead wrong.
Citizenship was never part of the deal. All DACA did was allow young people, whose parents brought them to this country illegally when there were younger than 16, to apply for a work permit — which had to be renewed every two years. Meanwhile, under DACA, they could at least live, work, study, get a driver’s license, or go to a clinic without the constant fear of deportation. Out of an estimated 1.2 million young people here illegally, some 800,000 have enrolled as Dreamers.
Who are they? They are college and graduate students. They’re doctors, nurses, construction workers, high-tech engineers, and teachers. They pay taxes. Ninety percent of them have jobs. Many serve in the military. One of them, Alonso Guillen, drowned while volunteering to rescue victims of Hurricane Harvey.
Who are they? They are the best of America. They are the future of America. They are Americans in every respect but one: a piece of paper. They speak English. This is the only country they know. And, most importantly, they’re not law-breakers. They didn’t decide to come here illegally. Maybe their parents did, but the Dreamers have committed no crime.
Who are we? That’s the real question. Are we really a people who punish children for the sins of their parents? That violates every principle of American jurisprudence, not to mention the tenets of every major religion. Are we really dumb enough to deport 800,000 of our brightest, hardest-working, and most highly motivated young people? Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says, from a purely business perspective, that is insane.
Trump’s decision to terminate DACA is offensive not only for what he did, but for how he did it: wrapping the meanest of actions in the most pious of motives.
First, Trump argued he was forced to terminate the Dreamers program because 10 states were filing a lawsuit against it. So what? The answer to that is not “I surrender,” it’s “See you in court!” Now, instead of 10 states suing to oppose DACA, 15 states and the District of Columbia have sued to defend DACA. So what’s the point?
Second, according to the White House, Trump had to end DACA because he promised to do so, which is absurd. Last time I checked, there’s nothing in the Constitution requiring a president to fulfill every stupid promise made during a campaign. Besides, while Trump promised to end DACA, he also promised that Dreamers had nothing to worry about because he was only going after those who’d committed crimes. Which promise did he break?
Third, Trump insists he’s not really ending the program, he’s just asking Congress to make it official. Please! After Congress has wrestled unsuccessfully with the Dreamers Act for 16 years — they couldn’t even pass it when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress — the idea they’ll fix it in the next six months is ridiculous.
Fourth, Trump says his hands are tied. Dreamers may be fine young people, he says, but we have to enforce the law, which, again, is absurd. Remember, these kids themselves did not break any law. And Trump can’t talk about the rule of law after he just pardoned Joe Arpaio.
Finally, and most galling of all, Donald Trump can’t stop talking about how bighearted he is, what compassion he has, and how much he LOVES the Dreamers. Liar, liar, pants on fire. Yeah, he loves them so much he wants to deport all 800,000 of them.
One final point. Notice: Trump didn’t make the Dreamers announcement himself. He delegated it to Jeff Sessions. In other words, Donald Trump is not only cruel and cold-hearted. He’s also a coward.
Bill Press is syndicated by Tribune Content Agency. His email address is: bill@ billpress.com.
Be wary of anyone who purports to understand the deep meaning of President Trump’s decision to side with the Democrats on short-term budget issues. Nobody knows what he’s up to, and this probably includes Trump himself.
Nonetheless, his recent foray into bipartisanship provides the occasion to explore the path he chose not to take at the beginning of his administration. He had the opportunity to put Democrats in a tight spot. Instead, he has spent his energies since Jan. 20 strengthening the hand of his opponents and weakening his own party.
If Trump had opened his presidency by detailing a major infrastructure plan, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and his colleagues would have had no choice but to cooperate, as Schumer himself signaled at the time. If Trump had also lived up to the promises of his campaign by proposing to make Obamacare better and not simply pushing for repeal, he might have fostered a similar spirit of bipartisan engagement.
He could have linked these Democratic-friendly ideas with an early call for tax cuts as part of tax reform, which would have made Republicans happy, as has his ongoing work to eviscerate Obamaera business regulations.
All this might have added to the deficit in a big way, but Trump has always lived on debt. This course would have been seen by some critics as philosophically muddled, and by some conservatives as betrayal. But you can imagine that the prevailing wisdom in Washington would have praised him for breaking through “stale” political categories and “rising above” the old partisan fights. He could also have given himself more bargaining room by putting everyone, Democrats as well as Republicans, in play.
It could be that Trump’s latest move is a reach for this lost chance, although it seemed to be more impulse than strategy. It was also sudden. No one on either side was prepared for Trump’s embrace of Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s suggestion to pass hurricane relief now and to set up December as the time for serious haggling. Democrats are likely to have more leverage then.
Being who he is, Trump may have wanted to take a slap at his putative allies, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, both of whom he seems to dislike intensely. And perhaps he was looking for a few days of good headlines. Pelosi reported he reveled in the great media coverage he received, as good an indicator as any that this is a guy who operates day-to-day.
Trump’s problem with moving from a relatively small policy gesture to an entirely new approach is that the immediate past cannot be erased.
He is a far weaker figure today than he was when he was inaugurated. His poll numbers are terrible, the Russia story has ballooned in importance, and Democrats are in no mood to throw him any lifelines. His words and actions on race and deportations have erected new moral barriers to any pragmatic turn toward working with him. “All he’s done in eight months,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide, “is make the price of cooperation a lot higher.”
In the meantime, he has filled government posts largely with conservative loyalists, further complicating any triangulation strategy involving Democrats. With the possible exception of Gary Cohn, his senior economic adviser, Trump’s crowd is on the extreme end of conventional conservative thinking. And Cohn is apparently so on the outs that there are reports he may soon be gone. Trump may have run against GOP orthodoxy in the primaries, but so much of what he has done so far would have been in any right-wing Republican’s playbook.
We should have learned long ago that looking for coherence from this president is a fool’s errand. He may have happened on a wiser political strategy too late to do himself much good, but just in time to hurt his already ailing party even more.
E.J. Dionne is syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group. His email address is ejdionne@ washpost.com.