By Trump’s own admission, it was not common humanity but viral images that finally forced him to do this:
President Trump caved to enormous political pressure on Wednesday and signed an executive order that ends the separation of families by indefinitely detaining parents and children together at the border.
‘I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated,’ [Trump said].
(The New York Times, June 20, 2018)
I cannot overstate that it was the “sight” not any “feeling” that moved him. After all, if he had any true feeling, he would have felt so chastened (for having ordered families be separated in first place) that he would have signed this executive order with no media in sight.
Instead, like an arsonist soliciting credit for putting out the fire he ignited, Trump summoned the media to cover his signing. Then again, this is the same president who spent months threatening to ignite a nuclear war with North Korea, and then started lobbying for a Nobel Peace prize just because he stopped doing so. #MunchausenByTrumpism!
Meanwhile, far from putting out his latest fire, the executive order this political arsonist just signed merely provides for children to be locked up along with their parents … indefinitely. Which, to be fair, I suppose is rather like taking them from the fire and putting them into the frying pan, no?
Not to mention that this PR stunt does nothing to reunite thousands of children – already separated and interned in shelters all over the country – with their parents.
NOTE: I refuse to dignify with any comment the weak, feckless, and pathetic way Trump and his rag-tag band of propagandists tried to blame Democrats – not only for implementing this separation policy but also for refusing to end it, as he has just done.
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Separating immigrant families…