The Trump Shutdown continues into its fifteenth day with no sign of resolution. Trump is actually becoming even more cemented into an increasingly bizarre stance that makes less sense every day. His raving tantrums on Twitter are filled with nonsense and lame memes that utterly fail to advance the dialog. Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and the new Democratic majority in Congress are ignoring his plaintive and desperate whining.
Trump’s recent comments claim that the idiotic vanity wall he’s so obsessed with will save billions of dollars. In addition to that, he insists that the new trade agreement (USMCA, which has not been ratified by the Senate) will effectively result in Mexico paying for the wall (or fence, or steel slat, or gold-tasseled drapery, or whatever). So the cost is being covered twice, but Trump is still demanding that Americans pay for it. He also claims that most of the people hurt by the shutdown support his position on the wall. But also that they are mostly Democrats. So he thinks that most Democrats are on his side of the great wall debate.
No one who has been paying attention really expects Trump to make sense anymore. It’s a given that he’s out of his mind and unfit for the office of a president (or a chicken coop). But on Sunday morning Trump went a bridge too far by embracing two of his most hated political foes: President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
“We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked…” Barrack Obama, 2005. I voted, when I was a Senator, to build a barrier to try to prevent illegal immigrants from coming in…” Hillary Clinton, 2015.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2019
You have to wonder what his Deplorables will think about him elevating the people that they have been trained to despise so vehemently for the past two years. Now Trump is hailing their vision and advocacy of rational immigration reforms. There’s just one problem. Trump is totally misrepresenting what both of them said and believe on the subject. For instance, here is what Obama went on to say after the out-of-context excerpt Trump posted. He was speaking in support of a 2006 immigration reform bill in the Senate:
“The bill the Judiciary Committee has passed clearly strengthens enforcement. To begin with, the agencies charged with border security would receive new technology, new facilities, and more people to stop, process, and deport illegal immigrants.”
Notice that there is nothing about a wall. He is advocating what all Democrats still want twelve years later: border security via smart reforms that actually address the problem. Not a wall that ignores the fact that the vast majority of undocumented immigrants enter the country through valid checkpoints.
Obama went to say that “while security might start at our borders, it doesn’t end there.” He made the case for an earned path to citizenship saying that “we must allow undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows and step on a path toward full participation in our society.” That’s hardly the policy that Trump and his Republican Nationalist Party are proposing.
As for Clinton, Trump also misrepresented her remarks made during the 2016 presidential campaign. Although she was somewhat open to “a barrier,” her full answer to a question from a voter quickly diverted to our need to deal with undocumented immigrants already in the country:
“I do think you have to control your borders. But I think that it’s also true that we need to do more to try to, number one, deal with the people who are already here, many of whom have been here for decades.”
Clinton explicitly mocked the notion of a wall at one point saying that it wouldn’t solve the problem. “I don’t care,” she said, “how tall the wall is or how big the door is.” She went on to advocate for providing more resources to the immigrants’ countries of origin in order to improve living conditions, reduce crime, and obviate the need for them to leave in the first place.
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.
If Trump was really interested in a rational, workable solution he would adopt the positions taken by Obama and Clinton, rather than distorting what they said for cheap political points. That would be the way out of the Trump Shutdown and relief for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who are the innocent victims of Trump’s ego-driven wall fetish. That is, if he actually cared about them.
