There was I thinking Donald Trump didn’t have a heart. It appears he does, but it’s as efficient as his economic agenda and his mastery of sentence structure. Who needs votes to see him out of office, we just need to keep buying him lunch, because it appears he’s just a few Big Macs away from meeting the guy who he said chose him to lead America and make prayer great again. I’d love to be a fly on the pearly gates to hear that conversation before Lucifer picks him up and drives him to eternal damnation.
Anyway back to the matter in hand. In an interesting fact as pointed out by Fareed Zakaria in his Washington Post column this weekend:
“Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama. He’s just louder and meaner.”
Suppose it now makes sense that he’s going after Obama. Truth is, for all the wasted money and made for TV performative politics. Trump is failing miserably to deliver on his economic self harm project. It’s time to examine the truth and not the fairytale.
Nobody wants to see uncontrolled immigration and there is no doubt that Democrats were guilty of failing to control it. This was a leading reason why Trump was gifted the keys to the White House again in November.
Having said that, immigration has long been the weapon of choice by Republicans come election time, so there is little wonder they have never been invested in finding a sustainable solution to the problem. If they wanted to find a solution they would have passed the bipartisan bill on the table in late 2023 that was the most conservative piece of immigration legislation in the past 30 years.
Trump is merely peddling a solution in search of a problem, it’s an act of economic lunacy wrapped in cruelty and white exceptionalism. It’s bad policy that deports 4% of the US workforce serving the farming sector, meat packing and hospitality to name but just three sectors.
He has turned deportation into big profits for the private companies who contributed to his re-election campaign. It is specifically designed to be brutal and cruel in an attempt to be a deterrent and in that regard, I think it safe to say in it has been successful.
What has not been successful is Trump’s intent to get the support of the public beyond his base. Polls show that the American public are very unhappy with the abduction of people from the streets by masked thugs who have little respect for the law or due process.
Americans were told ICE would go after criminals and the worst of the worst. Instead they are waiting at schools, workplaces and immigration courts seeking low hanging fruit, revoking the right to stay of law abiding citizens to meet deportation quotas set by Stephen Miller, a man caught on camera advocating for torture in the past. The man who was the architect of child separation in Trump’s last term.
The targets set are leading to the inevitable arrest and detention of American citizens, the breach of human rights and abuse of young children caught up in a nightmare not of their making.
Beneath the cruelty and inhumane detention of immigrants, is a far more sinister intention to militarise ICE to effectively create what amounts to an internal security apparatus that is funded better than all but 15 militaries in the world.
These ICE personnel are clearly untrained and are being used as muscle to support existing trained staff. Effectively America now has a state approved militia staffed by what appear to be largely white nationalists who to date have played at being pretend soldiers at weekends.
Now they have been given badges to terrorise people they hate because of the color of their skin. If you think their activities will stop at immigration enforcement you are very mistaken. These are Trumps personal thugs, his brown shirts who WILL be used to go after his enemies.
While those applauding him for this racial thuggery take a lap of honor, consider this, as reported by Fareed :
‘Donald Trump has deported fewer people per month than Barack Obama did, and barely more than Joe Biden during a similar span last year, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by NBC News.’
It’s just another prohibitively expensive con designed to give racists a political dopamine rush. It has little to do with immigration control and everything to do with cruelty and economic suicide.
It makes no economic sense to deprive the US treasury of $900 billion in tax revenue and payments into Social Security and Medicaid.
The KKK have simply pulled on a new suit in service of a dying man full of hate. My deepest thanks to Matthew Cooke for his excellent monologue, which aligns perfectly with my assessment.
