Trump throws grenades

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n attempt to finally pass legislation that 80% of Americans support — protecting from threat of deportation hundreds of thousands of undocumented “Dreamers” brought to the United States as minors — crashed and burned in the Senate last week.

Blame one thing only: President’s Trump’s willful sabotage.

By refusing to take yes for an answer, and angrily rejecting a bipartisan deal to save the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program he just weeks ago claimed to invite, the President revealed himself, for the umpteenth time, to be a profoundly unreliable negotiator, and a liar.

We don’t choose the word lightly, but there’s no other honest way to put it.

Five weeks ago, in a televised White House meeting with congressional members of both parties convened to discuss how to save DACA, the President said, “When this group comes back . . . with an agreement, I’m signing it. I mean, I will be signing it. I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, gee, I want this or I want that.’ I’ll be signing it.”

By “this,” he meant a bipartisan agreement that would give Dreamers the right to go to school and work and an eventual path to legal status in exchange for border security funding, with perhaps a few other things thrown in.

Days after that meeting, senators of both parties returned with an immigration blueprint. Rather than signing it, the President, goaded by his anti-immigration aide Stephen Miller, sneered, called some nations covered in the proposal “shithole countries” — and blew it up.

This week, senators made a new bipartisan effort that moved still further in Trump’s direction. It married DACA protections with a robust $25 billion for the President’s beloved border wall, a major concession.

Trump blew that up too, threatening an immediate veto.

The President’s new non-negotiable is a hardline overhaul of the entire legal immigration system that would chop the number of immigrants admitted to America annually in half. Republican Sen. Tom Cotton calls the reforms “not an opening bid in negotiations. It is a best and final offer.”

That’s not the way the legislative process works.

Over five weeks, Democrats have moved from outright rejection of a wall — a wall Trump swore and swore and swore Mexico would pay for — to supporting an initial $25 billion commitment.

The President has gone in the opposite direction — from entertaining, or pretending to entertain, a “clean” bill on Dreamers to one with enhanced border security to a maximalist take-itor-leave-it stance.

(When presented to the Senate, his plan, which happens to be deeply unpopular in opinion polls, got the fewest votes of four approaches debated.)

Adding insult to injury, Trump is accusing Democrats of wanting the “issue” of immigration, rather than a solution.

The opposite is true. The President twice blew up good-faith proposals because that’s what his hard-right base demands going into the 2018 elections.

If he can’t stand up to that faction, then he is not just a liar. He is a coward.