Engineered from the beginning to be a spectacle of cruelty, this Stephen Miller-designed plan to ratchet up the pain and terror of families fleeing violence in Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico was a live-fire exercise in state power with weeping, traumatized children as cannon fodder. They boasted it was a political winner in a year when Republicans aren’t exactly crowned with legislative laurels, and admitted it was a play to appeal to the darkest, shittiest residents of our national shame closet. They thought it would appeal to Trump’s desire to seem strong and decisive, the alpha-male winner. Instead, it was a political and moral disaster for the president and the administration.
In a week of brutal and evident human suffering, the wall-to-wall media coverage meant the political costs of this policy rose and rose, and Trump’s defeat was inevitable from the start. When Trump signed the executive order reversing his policy on Wednesday, it was an epic political defeat for his presidency, his staff, his congressional defenders, and his media cheerleaders.
By Thursday the scope of his defeat was evident. Beaten to a political pulp, Trump found even Republican stalwarts disowning him and his policy. The otherwise obedient Gimp Caucus has members going on the record to decry the heartlessness of separating children from their parents. Congress is in chaos, flailing to pass something, anything to mitigate the damage. Even the Trumpiest Trumpers broke. In Florida, Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, a man who emulates Trump so strictly I expect him to sport a blond wig, ran like a scalded dog.
Now, his administration has added to its catalog of calamitous failures, his Department of Homeland Security director is politically radioactive, and as hard as it is to imagine, his government looks even more inept, chaotic, malicious, and deceptive than his White House crew. Whipsawed between holding on to his image as the hardest of the immigration hardliners and the terrible, horrible, indelible images, Trump has had a spectacularly awful week.
The private polling members of Congress saw this week was a white-hot disaster. The public polling was the same; between two-thirds and three-quarters of American voters opposed the policy. Strikingly, Trump didn't hold his usual levels of base voters support on this issue, even with the IV drip of the Trump-right news media pumping in their most potent opiate load of MS-13 scare stories.
https://amp.thedailybeast.com/this-...-broke-trumps-spell?__twitter_impression=true
In a week of brutal and evident human suffering, the wall-to-wall media coverage meant the political costs of this policy rose and rose, and Trump’s defeat was inevitable from the start. When Trump signed the executive order reversing his policy on Wednesday, it was an epic political defeat for his presidency, his staff, his congressional defenders, and his media cheerleaders.
By Thursday the scope of his defeat was evident. Beaten to a political pulp, Trump found even Republican stalwarts disowning him and his policy. The otherwise obedient Gimp Caucus has members going on the record to decry the heartlessness of separating children from their parents. Congress is in chaos, flailing to pass something, anything to mitigate the damage. Even the Trumpiest Trumpers broke. In Florida, Congressman and gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis, a man who emulates Trump so strictly I expect him to sport a blond wig, ran like a scalded dog.
Now, his administration has added to its catalog of calamitous failures, his Department of Homeland Security director is politically radioactive, and as hard as it is to imagine, his government looks even more inept, chaotic, malicious, and deceptive than his White House crew. Whipsawed between holding on to his image as the hardest of the immigration hardliners and the terrible, horrible, indelible images, Trump has had a spectacularly awful week.
The private polling members of Congress saw this week was a white-hot disaster. The public polling was the same; between two-thirds and three-quarters of American voters opposed the policy. Strikingly, Trump didn't hold his usual levels of base voters support on this issue, even with the IV drip of the Trump-right news media pumping in their most potent opiate load of MS-13 scare stories.
https://amp.thedailybeast.com/this-...-broke-trumps-spell?__twitter_impression=true
