Collateral damage from cruel politics
Even some Republicans are learning that harrowing images of crying children are not necessarily a winner with suburban voters in the US heartland.
In some ways, the shocking images of caged immigrant children in warehouses near the US-Mexico border are the inevitable culmination of the ugly rhetoric President Donald Trump unleashed on the campaign trail. He talked about ‘‘bad hombres’’, Mexican rapists and ‘‘s...hole countries’’, lumping together almost every nation and culture that is less privileged and to the south of the United States as a large, threatening other.
The solution to the teeming threat was a wall. The giant wall seemed like one of the jokes of the campaign, as grandiose and ridiculous as a Trump steak or a gold-plated Trump elevator.
But Trump still wants the US$25 billion (NZ $36b) wall, and the more than 2000 children who have been removed from parents at the border and locked in detention centres are bargaining chips in his long negotiation, and collateral damage from a cynical political calculation.
The calculation, according to an Associated Press report, is to be even tougher on immigration. Trump wanted a ‘‘culture war’’ issue, similar to his attack on protesting football players, and aides urged him to make immigration the key issue of the 2018 mid-term elections.
The mid-terms are taken as a half-time referendum, which explains why Trump now seems to be back in campaign mode. Campaigning suits him more than governing, as long as there is a weak enemy to identify. He is gambling that enough of his base responds to this reassertion of political will and strength.
One of the ideological architects of the 2016 campaign, former adviser Steve Bannon, thinks Trump is on track and called his actions ‘‘a profile in courage’’, explaining that ‘‘this is why America elected him. He is not a politician, he’s a leader. He will not back down on core principles’’.
But a central mystery of the campaign and presidency is whether Trump really believes this stuff. Is he an ideologue or an opportunist? Is he a dweller of the populist swamp or someone who manipulates and speaks for it? The former position would be merely ignorance and stupidity, but the latter would be nihilism and callousness.
It gets very cynical. Trump has misrepresented the policy as the Democrats’ law rather than a hard line taken by his own administration. Blaming his opponents for an immigration crisis of his own making, he demands they come to the table to pass new legislation. But the disconnection between his attribution of blame to the Democrats and AttorneyGeneral Jeff Sessions’ boast that the policy works as a deterrent and even has biblical backing exposes the hollowness of this political tactic.
There are growing signs that some Republican governors think Trump is going too far and that this could become Trump’s Katrina, in reference to the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the New Orleans flood in 2005. A small number have joined Democratic governors in withdrawing National Guard troops from the border. Texas senator Ted Cruz has proposed alternative legislation.
It seems that even some Republicans are learning that harrowing images of crying children are not necessarily a winner with suburban voters in the US heartland. But, as we also learned in 2016, there is always another low to sink to.