An evil contest of border savagery
Trump borrows from playbooks of gangs, dictators in family crises
In a contest to see who is the most savage — Donald Trump or the people he most envies — Trump appears to have blinked, but don’t believe it. He has already imprisoned and hidden several thousand children away from their parents, and that will be sufficient for several more rounds of play. In any case, the executive order “against separating families” he swore up and down he could not issue has a varied toolkit for mistreating whole families, children and all, whose sins are to want (1) to live and raise their kids, and (2) (the really unforgivable, insulting, offense) to be Americans.
He and his gang remain determined that the United States is not going to succor victims if they can help it.
Who is at the table in this game? On one side are the gang leaders and corrupt, murderous police in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. These guys are the real thing, cut from the same cloth as Trump’s better-known heroes Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Rodrigo Duerte. They kill, imprison, dismember and rape as a conscious managerial/motivational technique. They are about making money and making people fear them, just like Trump.
Life is so ghastly in these places (when the gang comes to conscript your teenage son or enslave your daughter, it’s not a request; it’s your life and the kids’ on the line) that thousands of families have hit the road on a dangerous trip through Mexico to present themselves to the United States as refugees.
Trump’s idea (served up to him by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions and immigration policy adviser Stephen Miller) is to make the United States even more hostile and dangerous than the places they are fleeing. It had three parts, an irresistible hat trick, especially for an amoral narcissist surrounded by sycophants and playing to Fox News (and Putin, of course).
First, characterize these refugees (and actually all immigrants) against all the facts as dangerous criminals.
Second, make it known to refugees from the hellholes south of Mexico that they will be so abused should they reach the United States (here’s where breaking up the families was just the ticket), that that fear, added to the cost and hazards of the journey itself, will make them stay home and be killed quietly.
Third, turn refugees away from the ports of entry where they can apply for refugee status, and seize the kids when mom and dad commit the misdemeanor (sic) of walking across wherever they can and trying to apply at a U.S. Border Patrol station. This is just catnip for the fearful, vengeful core of Trump’s political base and only draws the meekest diffidence from a few congressional Republicans.
The whole project, unfortunately, appears to have had the same high-quality, tough-minded Republican planning and foresight as the Iraq invasion, so we have Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in a press conference admitting that she has no idea what’s actually happening on the border, and a whole government that has lost track of the girls and subteen children it confiscated.
Remarkably, the part about the kids (but nothing else) even revolted some of the most unregenerate nativists and haters in Trump’s coalition, and some of them have dragged him to be the last public figure in the United States to figure out that tearing children away from their parents was a bad political move. This means he has lost a round and shown weakness: Trump’s insecurities, along with his cruelty and mendacity, assure that the Hannity-Bannon-Trump phone lines will be humming, figuring out how to get back on the plan and be a winner again.
It’s going to be extremely tedious to reconnect all those kids, some of whom don’t even speak Spanish, never mind English, with parents of whom some have already been deported and the rest dispersed.
Should we deport all the kids back to El Salvador in C54’s, just dump them out on the tarmac alone? Put them in Magdalene work camps and rent them out to farmers and Trump hotels at low rates? When the first kid dies of heat prostration in one of those tents in the sun, should we quietly bury him, or make a PR event out of it? When it turns out some of the girls have been sexually abused in our hands, will that be a feature or a bug? Trump is losing the ‘toughness’ = cruelty contest, but only for the moment: He doesn’t do “sorry” and he doesn’t do losing.