So, my brother chose to not cast his lot with “Writing” as a career, explaining why he’s in Europe vacationing, and I’m here discussing well …
My brother emails me to tell me of the BBC story he just watched, and the sick feeling in his stomach about his country, and what the world must think. The story dealt with the fact that Trump just signed off on his reversal of the “We’ll take your kid away!” policy, and did so without a plan for putting the thousands of kids back with their parents. The story was brutal in its assessment.
Why should it not be? There is literally no plan to implement this reversal (because we’re still “zero tolerance” and have very few places to put families who stay together now.) We have no plan to get kids and parents re-united, no plan on what to do if the kids are reunited with parents, and we have no hope of this president putting together a plan. In short, this crises, politically and as a humanitarian crises, is just beginning. It is also beginning to crumple Trump.
Of course, some Republicans will buy “if I am arrested tonight, I will not see my kids” but even most Republicans seem uneasy about this whole “let’s be as mean as possible, we’ll even go after the kids!” approach. And, they don’t know how deep it goes. In fact, we may not know how deep the trouble goes. Here’s the thing, having just made up the “separation policy,” the INS wasn’t all that great at implementing it, and no one gave much thought as to how they were going to eventually re-unite a parent with a 5 year old who don’t speak much English. Even when translated, apparently no one thought about the trouble any child would have with answering, “Give us your parents’ full names, hometown, former place of employment and current legal address.” Moreover, the geniuses implementing the non-plan will have trouble asking parents “What is your child’s full name and where was he/she sent and where are they now?” because in all too many cases, they never documented who was sent where with no plan to get them back together. This is just the beginning.
Now, let your political self imagine 3, 4 months ahead, and the crises that we know has many Repub voters already feeling uncomfortable imagine the coming wave when it hits home that it may be years and years before some of these kids are reunited, if ever. “Trump has proved remarkably impervious to elite and media criticism, but even he couldn’t withstand this,” said Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.
I have been wrong on so many predictions with respect to Trump that I probably ought to know better than to make another, but I feel safer in saying that “this” – intentionally orphaning kids, and then being unable to fix it, will be the “thing,” that turns the 25%-40% of Trump voters into getting his approval ratings right back down in the low 30s, where he ought to be, not 42 like now. We know Trump pays more attention to “ratings” than doing the job, and the panic will cycle. In fact, the panic has already started.
My main man of letters (now that Hitchinson passed), Charlie Pierce has picked up on the shift in the breeze, too.
In recent days, as the backlash has built against the crime spree against humanity that his administration has unleashed at our southern border, he’s gone so manic and so utterly truthless that Ashley Parker of The Washington Post felt moved to make it plain.
Ouch, that’s bad, gone on.
On Wednesday, he gave an unhinged diatribe to a largely friendly audience at the National Federation of Independent Businesses at the end of which he hugged a flag.
He hugged a what? Is that even legal?
Gutsy is as gutsy does. The president* is gleefully indulging in inhumane practices that would shame a cockroach.. His idea of a “compromise” is a bill that keeps families together in detention camps and funds his stupid boondoggle of a wall. He’s going out of his way to snipe at political opponents who already are dead. He is a fool and a coward, and he’s sounding like he’s half-mad.
Now, you see why Charlie gets paid a lot, to write, while I simply get paid. Regardless, the panic is setting-in and it will reverberate with huge political implications and worse, unforgivable, heart wrenching, humanitarian ones. We have what are called “vulnerable child detention centers” now, did you know that? Rachel Maddow couldn’t even read it off the monitor it sickened her. MSNB just reported that the Trump administration is asking the military to find spots to put 20,000 families. Though it is better than separation, I’m sure both parties will have trouble with that deal. And were that not enough, the “deal maker” is being exposed as someone who can’t even put together a deal that even semi-addresses the crises, and I’m not talking among everyone, I mean with just the House Republicans according to Politico, today.
I do believe that this will prove to be the undoing of 87%-Republican-approval rating trump, and the beginning of the Trump turn. There’s a reason that politicians famously once had to kiss a lot of babies. You don’t mess with kids, anyone’s kids.
Ironically, it is not like all of a sudden asylum-seekers just showed-up. We used to have a system to deal with it, and it worked remarkably well. The system involved allowing the person(s) a temporary VISA to apply for refugee status. They could stay at a detention center or be sponsored. They would get a hearing, and if they qualified for protection, they got a green card, a path to citizenship; In other words, we made them Americans, and our nation has benefitted for hundreds of years from the program. Because “asylum seekers” are not “drug dealers,” or “rapists,” they are often literally the best ones, tired of war, and oppression, having the gumption and dream to make it in a place that promised freedom.
***My never-to-be-damned -enough laptop went on an unannounced summer vacation and spent some time at the computer repair spa, so I’ve been gone for a few days. Which means it has been 3 days since I offered friendship and fun to all twitter followers, @MiciakZoom.
