Has DACA prompted Trump to show more compassion? Doubtful
Last week, President Donald Trump reached a deal with Democrats to enshrine into law protections for young illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children. Within a matter of days, these young people went from fearing deportation to homelands some had never known, to having a potential shot at citizenship.
Did this mark the arrival of a new, compassionate, capable Donald Trump?
Sadly, probably not. Trump’s actions are rarely underpinned by principles or a vision of who we are as a nation. Even on matters of near-perfect moral clarity, he is often transactional and capricious. If he does the right thing, there must be an angle.
His word is never final; it’s only the latest in a never-ending set of tactical adjustments made with one eye on his poll numbers and the other on Fox News. If it benefits Trump personally to renege on last week’s tentative deal with Democrats and woo xenophobes and bigots instead of reviving the “DREAM Act,” he will.
If his core supporters thought his sympathy for Dreamers was evidence that he was getting wobbly on immigration, he made clear they could still count on his sympathy for racists. Soon after Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Senate’s lone black Republican, privately scolded him for his “sterile” response to “hate groups who over three centuries of this country’s history have made it their mission to create upheaval in minority communities,” Trump once again asserted what he saw as an equivalence between the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va., and those who aggressively opposed them. And while he did sign a congressional resolution denouncing these hate groups, his refusal to unequivocally reject them is what led to the unanimously approved measure to begin with.
It was Trump, too, who had placed those young immigrants in jeopardy of deportation when he had his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, announce an end to President Barack Obama’s 5-year-old executive order — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — which let them live, work and go to school in the United States. Almost immediately after Sessions denounced these “Dreamers” as job-stealers and potential gang members, Trump seemed to shift, amid a wave of outrage at the administration’s cruelty.
Wednesday night, Trump had dinner with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leaders of the Senate and House, who later announced that the president had agreed to their proposal “to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly,” along with border security measures, but no border wall.
What followed the next day was the now familiar pingponging of tweets and contradictory assertions from Trump and others that threw Congress into chaos, as Republicans tried to parse what the president meant. There would be a path to citizenship, or there would be no such path? The wall was being built, or the wall would be built later?
Conservatives erupted. Ann Coulter, author of “In Trump We Trust,” unleashed a stream of protests, demanding that he be impeached.
Of course, Trump always saw the wall as more of a campaign slogan than a possibility. Even congressional Republicans are balking at handing him billions for a quixotic project that won’t be completed for years, if ever.
Amid Thursday’s uproar, the conservative Never-trump stalwart William Kristol had sound advice on dealing with Trump.
“To liberals, centrists & conservatives,” he wrote, “work for good policies during Trump’s presidency; never lose sight of his unfitness to be president.”
No one should cheer Trump’s latest moves as a pivot toward principles. So far, his main operating principle seems to be service to himself.